01590976

Component

This project—was conducted by Federal Highway Safety Administration (FHWA), Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), and CH2M HILL—involves preparing an Informational Report on how to incorporate safety into the design of a project. New analytical tools developed in the past three years are available for designers, planners, traffic engineers, and maintenance/construction engineers to quantify safety in project development; to a level of detail that had not been possible in the past. With these tools, the expected safety performance of a transportation project can be evaluated and the safety implications of incremental changes in design elements can be quantified.   Included in the report is guidance on how to implement these tools and best practices for design professionals so they can apply the most appropriate technical knowledge on quantitative safety performance – crashes and their outcomes – to develop projects for a range of contexts. Best practices incorporate the basic technical knowledge on safety effects, as well as analysis processes tailored to project size, scope, and context. With such input, professionals can compare safety data with other measureable data on the environment, costs, traffic operations, etc., to make an informed decision. The Informational Report being developed in this project describes the methodologies available to provide a consolidated estimate of the safety differential between various design treatments. The goal is to illustrate for a practitioner the quantitative safety differences of the various designs. This allows them to make sound engineering judgments when seeking flexibility within existing American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) design guidance or when seeking design exceptions on projects that may not meet standard AASHTO or state or local criteria.  

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AFB10 Standing Committee on Geometric Design.

01584066

16-3402

English

15p

2016

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References

Best practices; Geometric design; Highway safety; Methodology; Plan implementation

Practitioners

Design; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-3402

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 5:29PM