Add to ORKGAvailable documents concerning risk management and assessment of road tunnels provide almost no guidance on risk criteria. Three different types of risk are considered in the paper for road tunnels: individual risk Rind of a person related to specific operational conditions, expected risk Rexp expressed in terms of number of fatalities per tunnel and year and societal risk expressed in terms of cumulative frequency F = P(Rm ≥ N), presented commonly as F- N curve, per tunnel (or 1 km of a tunnel) and year. Recommendations for the lower and upper bounds of relevant risk indicators are derived from commonly accepted safety requirements. The expected risk Rexp is used to optimize tunnel utility and to specify the optimum risk level. It appears ...