01557475

Component

In macroscopic evaluations to establish traffic safety policies, typical exposure measures for crash rates include population, the number of vehicles registered, and vehicle-mile traveled (VMT). However, the evaluation results differ by the exposure measures applied and confuse the decision process of highway safety policies. Therefore, there is a need for developing an index that integrates crash rates associated with different exposure measures in order to obtain consistent evaluation results. This study developed a method that comparatively evaluates an individual nation’s highway safety by integrating crash rates according to different exposure measures. The study also conducted a comparative evaluation on international highway safety among countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD). The influence of each exposure index was evaluated and the optimal weights for individual crash rates by different exposure measures were derived through the Least Squares Method (LSM). The compounded index integrating conventional indices combined with the optimal weights successfully provides consistent results in assessing safety performances among countries in OECD. Resolving the inconsistencies resulted in different exposure measures, thus the proposed method can be utilized when comparing different countries’ level of highway safety and establishing road safety investment plans and policies.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE90 Transportation in the Developing Countries. Alternate title: Evaluation of Highway Safety Using Macroscopic Traffic Accident Exposure Measures: Case Study of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Members.

01550057

15-4720

English

13p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References; Tables

Case studies; Crash exposure; Crash rates; Highway safety; Macroscopic traffic flow; Traffic crashes

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I80: Accident Studies

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-4720

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:34PM