Development of Safety Performance Functions for Multilane Highway and Freeway Segments Maintained by the Virginia Department of Transportation

The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) adopted the software Safety Analyst™ as its highway safety management tool in 2009. One of the requirements for implementation of Safety Analyst is to have appropriate safety performance functions (SPFs) reflecting Virginia conditions. The purpose of this study was to develop such SPFs for multilane highway and freeway segments that could replace Safety Analyst’s default SPFs. Five years (2004-2008) of data collected from 20,235 multilane highway segments and 2,905 directional freeway segments in Virginia were used in the development of the SPFs. Statewide SPFs were developed for 4 subtypes of multilane highway segments and 10 subtypes of freeway segments. VDOT district-group SPFs were developed for 4 subtypes of multilane highway segments. The default SPFs in Safety Analyst were found to be different than the developed Virginia SPFs with respect to their curve shapes, and, as a result, adjusting the default SPFs to Virginia conditions by calibration factors resulted in inaccurate crash predictions at low and high volumes of annual average daily traffic. Thus, the Virginia-specific statewide SPFs developed in this study should be used when implementing Safety Analyst in Virginia. Although the shapes of the multilane highway segment SPFs were found to vary across VDOT districts, incorporating variations through the creation of new subtypes was found to be inappropriate for the current version of Safety Analyst. As a consequence, district-group SPFs for the multilane highway segments cannot be implemented in Safety Analyst. However, all SPFs developed in this study, including district-group SPFs, can be implemented without the use of Safety Analyst. Therefore, use of the statewide SPFs developed in this study is recommended when Safety Analyst can be used and use of the statewide or district-group SPFs developed in this study is recommended when implementation of Safety Analyst is not feasible.

• Record URL:
  http://www.virginiadot.org/vtrc/main/online_reports/pdf/14-r14.pdf
• 
• Corporate Authors:

  Virginia Center for Transportation Innovation and Research

  530 Edgemont Road
  Charlottesville, VA  United States  22903

  Virginia Department of Transportation

  1401 East Broad Street
  Richmond, VA  United States  23219

  Federal Highway Administration

  400 North 8th Street
  Richmond, VA  United States  23219-4825
• Authors:
  • Kweon, Young-Jun
  • Lim, In-Kyu
• Publication Date: 2014-5

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 42p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Crash data; Freeways; Highway safety; Multilane highways; Safety management; Software
• Identifier Terms: Safety Analyst; Safety Performance Functions
• Geographic Terms: Virginia
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I80: Accident Studies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01529449
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: FHWA/VCTIR 14-R14, VCTIR 14-R14
• Contract Numbers: 99048
• Files: TRIS, ATRI, USDOT, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Jun 30 2014 9:41AM