01706184

Component

https://doi.org/10.1177/0361198119850127

Much of the earlier work on rural safety focused on state-maintained roadways and little is known about the safety performance of low-volume county-maintained roads. This study involved the estimation of safety performance for rural county roadways (paved and gravel). This was accomplished through the development of safety performance functions (SPFs) to estimate the number of annual crashes at a given highway segment, crash modification factors to determine the impacts associated with various roadway and geometric characteristics, and severity distribution functions (SDFs) to predict the crash severity. County road segment data were collected across a sample of 30 counties representing all regions of Michigan. Because of the overwhelming proportion of deer crashes, only non-deer-related crashes were considered. To minimize the influence of variability among counties, the random effect negative binomial model was used to develop SPFs. In addition, a multinomial logit model was used to develop SDFs. Paved county roadways showed approximately double the crash occurrence rate of typical state-maintained two-lane rural highways, and gravel roadways showed a substantially greater crash occurrence rate than paved county roadways across the equivalent range of traffic volumes. The economic analysis showed that it is beneficial to pave a gravel road when the traffic volume is greater than 600 vehicles per day. The random effect variable is significant in all the calibrated models, which shows that there is a considerable variability among counties that cannot be captured with the available variables. Not considering the random effects will result in biased estimation of crashes.

19-04257

English

pp 405-415

2019-10

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

Digital/other

Figures (2) ; References (15) ; Tables (9)

Binomial distributions; County roads; Highway safety; Injury severity; Multinomial logits; Rural highways

Safety performance functions

Highways; Safety and Human Factors

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Apr 26 2019 1:41PM