Incorporating Road Safety in Rural Road Network Level Pavement Management

Rural roads play an important part in country’s road network providing connectivity to the major roads in the network. However, most of these roads are not maintained in an efficient manner. Moreover, safety issues on these roads are often not given priority during maintenance planning, since pavement condition gets priority often, especially in developing countries. The main reason for this being, lack of reliable accident data, road condition monitoring regime in most of the local road agencies. This study proposes a methodology to incorporate road safety performance in rural roads in maintenance planning using a multi-objective optimization approach. Road safety performance is defined in terms of the cumulative safety index which is computed based on the severity, exposure, frequency of safety issues which are identified from road safety audits. The safety performance is also included along with the pavement condition related indices such as IRI, pothole number etc. in decision criteria for the Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) analysis which comprised of the two objectives, minimize network International Roughness Index (IRI) and minimum network CSI. Applicability of the developed model has been demonstrated from the illustrative example of a rural road network. Results shown that, roads which has safety issues can also be prioritized in budget allocation whilst ensuring the network level pavement condition can be maintained at a reasonable level. The proposed methodology offers a simplified approach to incorporate road safety issues in rural road maintenance planning.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 20p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01764313
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-01560
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Feb 4 2021 11:00AM