Modeling Crash Risk of Highway Work Zones with Relatively Short Durations

Highway work zones greatly affect operational and safety performance of traffic. Existing studies have primarily focused on exploring safety issues of long-term work zones whereas safety issues associated with a large number of relatively shorter duration work zones are seldom examined. Thus, this paper aims to present an investigation of traffic safety in these work zones with relatively short duration. Considering low frequency of crashes due to this type of short duration work zones with respect to its crash condition and non-crash condition, a “rare event” logistic regression model is developed to explore the causal relationship between a set of contributing factors and the crash risk. The proposed model accounts for the imbalance issues of events (crashes) vs. non-event (non-crash) conditions in modeling low frequency crash occurrences. In addition, the model uses actual traffic data to reduce the bias of using aggregated exposure data (i.e. averaged traffic volume over a day, month, year, etc.). The modeling results based on a case study show that the work zone length, traffic volume and lane closure are positively associated with the crash risk in those work zones with short duration. The proposed model with specific model corrections and actual input data is found to improve the depiction of the relationship between these factors and the crash risk based on the comparison of the area under the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristics) curves of different models.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB55 Work Zone Traffic Control.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Yang, Hong
    • Ozbay, Kaan
    • Xie, Kun
    • Bartin, Bekir
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2015

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 13p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01551622
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 15-0098
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Jan 27 2015 11:23AM