DEMONSTRATION CORRIDOR ROAD SAFETY AUDIT WITH SOFTWARE
Road safety audits for driveways, intersections, and highway corridors are the beginning of a new era for traffic operations and safety management that are expected to eliminate almost 5,000 fatalities and 250,000 of the 3.5 million disabling injuries each year. This paper presents an application of a software approach to the calculation of traffic safety and delay performance for a 7-mi (11-km) corridor that utilizes a finite-element analysis approach to break the corridor and its driveways, intersections, and midblocks into discrete elements that are each individually disaggregated. These multiple finite-element analyses have the ability to predict (and potentially prevent) accidents, injuries, and delay at any isolated location. The software also estimates hourly queue lengths, trip generation, and egress average daily traffic (ADT) for up to two land uses at each driveway including directional hourly and daily turning movements, estimates the appropriate driveway spacing to maintain isolation operations based on design vehicle type and acceleration/deceleration rates, and even provides an expert safety advisor to guide traffic control devices and left-turn bay selections. Together, the software modules permit intersection and corridor injury-based lifetime risk levels to be calculated for comparison to user-defined maximum allowable lifetime risk levels from which an injury-based Safety Levels of Service is also set for each intersection and corridor. The integrated conflict opportunity expressions for annual accidents and injuries; the multiple finite-element analyses for each driveway, intersection, and midblock within a highway corridor; and the user-defined injury based Risk and Safety Levels of Service for both intersections and entire corridors provide unique performance-based standards that offer both a strategic and microscopic safety and delay perspective that will become essential in generating reasonable safety recommendations and proving the efficacy of both intersection and corridor road safety and performance audits.
- Record URL:
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Supplemental Notes:
- Full conference proceedings available only on CD.
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Corporate Authors:
Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE)
Washington, DC United States -
Authors:
- Kaub, A R
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Conference:
- Enhancing Transportation Safety in the 21st Century ITE International Conference
- Location: Kissimmee, Florida
- Date: 1999-3-28 to 1999-3-31
- Publication Date: 1999
Language
- English
Media Info
- Pagination: 14p
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Demonstration projects; Driveways; Finite element method; Highway corridors; Highway safety; Injuries; Intersections; Left turn lanes; Mathematical prediction; Risk assessment; Safety audits; Software; Traffic control devices; Traffic crashes; Traffic delays; Traffic safety
- Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; I71: Traffic Theory; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 00768829
- Record Type: Publication
- Files: TRIS
- Created Date: Sep 14 1999 12:00AM