Screening Urban Road Networks for Corridors with Promise

Both federal and state policy makers increasingly emphasize the need to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries. Finding improved methods to enhance roadway safety has become a top priority. In an attempt to reduce the number of crashes and the resulting injuries and fatalities, high crash locations should be identified for increased law enforcement activities, education programs, and engineering improvements. Prioritizing high crash locations for potential improvements would benefit local agencies with limited budgets. The role of corridor level screening is to examine periodically the entire urban roadway network in order to generate a list of corridors ranked in order of priority by which detailed engineering studies should be conducted. Ongoing debates in regards to corridor level network screening include what should constitute a corridor for the purpose of network screening, and how a local agency should perform a corridor screening. This study investigated several options to determine urban corridor limits and discussed the merits and weaknesses of different options. A Corridor Safety Index (CSI) is proposed as a performance measure for corridor screening. The index can be used to screen sites that have promise as locations where improvements will result in substantial crash reduction. The findings will assist engineers to proactively identify and analyze high crash locations from a corridor perspective and detect potential problematic locations not identified through the traditional hotspot analysis.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB10 Transportation Safety Management.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Zhao, Yue
    • Tian, Zong Z
    • Reider, Chuck
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2015

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 19p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01558953
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 15-5690
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Mar 31 2015 9:09AM