Optimal Investment Decision-Making Strategies for Safety Improvements on Urban Intersections

Urban intersections crashes cause significant economic loss among all roadways. The safety management and investment process undertaken by most states in the United States is referred as hazard elimination program, and consists of three standardized steps i.e. (i) identification of critical crash locations, (ii) development of countermeasures and (iii) resource allocation among identified crash locations. Often these three steps are independent with limited detail of each step at the state planning agencies. Literature review underlines the importance of third step and lack of sophisticated tools available to state planning agencies for leveraging information obtained from first two steps. Further, non-strategic fund allocation and unavailability of methods for evaluating strategies leads to sub-optimal fund allocation. This paper overcomes these limitations and proposes multiple optimal resource allocation strategies for improvements at urban intersections that maximize safety benefits, under budget and policy constraints. Policy measures based on benefits maximization (economic competitiveness), priority to locations with higher severity of crashes (relative urgency), equitable allocation (equity), and pure dominance (multiple alternatives at one location) produces significantly different alternative and fund allocation for investment. The model is applied to selected intersections in four counties of southeast Michigan. Results from model application reinforce pragmatic consideration of developed strategies/policies and tools for investment/resource allocation of highway safety projects on critical urban intersections.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADA50 Transportation Programming and Investment Decision-Making. Alternate title: Optimal Investment Decision-Making Strategies for Safety Improvements to Urban Intersections
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Mishra, Sabyasachee
  • Sharma, Sushant
  • Golias, Mihalis
  • Boyles, Stephen D
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Appendices; Figures; Glossary; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 20p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Case studies; Decision making; Highway safety; Improvements; Intersections; Traffic crashes; Urban highways
• Geographic Terms: Michigan
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; I73: Traffic Control; I85: Safety Devices used in Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01515493
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-4254
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 24 2014 8:42AM