01515577

Component

Economic competitiveness and equity can be two competing objectives while allocating funds for implementation of safety alternatives on urban intersections. One of the critical phase of current safety management process (hazard elimination program) undertaken by most states is resource allocation among identified crash locations. Literature underlines the importance of this phase and lack of sophisticated tools available to state planning agencies for evaluating federal and state policies. The study overcomes this limitation by proposing an optimization based resource allocation model that maximizes safety benefits, subjected to budget and policy constraints. The proposed model incorporates economic competitiveness in the allocation and distributes improvements to urban intersections such that maximum economical benefits are obtained from crash savings. However, results show that while economic competitiveness leads to optimal benefits, resource allocation is inequitable. Hence equity based models are developed by adding two policy options: equity in opportunity and equity in outcome. The resource allocation model is solved using sequential quadratic programming. The model is applied to crash prone intersections in four counties of southeast Michigan. The proposed model is generic and scalable, with flexibility in including policy options often considered by state and local agencies.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB10 Transportation Safety Management.

01503729

14-4215

English

21p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Appendices; Figures; Glossary; References; Tables

Case studies; Competition; Crash locations; Economic factors; Financing; Highway safety; Intersections; Urban highways

Michigan

Economics; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I10: Economics and Administration; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-4215

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 3:27PM