On Accident Prediction Functions for Urban Road Intersections

Transportation Research Procedia, 2016

Evaluation of road safety measures appears to be the weakest component of road safety management systems in Europe. To improve Road Infrastructure Safety Management, road authorities, road designers and road safety practitioners need prediction tools, commonly known as Accident Prediction Models (APMs), allowing them to analyze the potential safety issues, to identify safety improvements and to estimate the potential effect of these improvements in terms of crash reduction. Within the above

Infrastructure development and/or enhancement of urban areas entail the assessment of safety parameters for the efficient and safe movement of the road users from a transportation engineer's perspective. It has become an essential part of every transportation plan to focus on the road user safety aspects not only in the present traffic condition, but also with the changing scenario of the traffic flow. The major purpose of this study was to develop an accident prediction model that would depict the effect of some of the major factors on accident causation on urban roads. The factors included road characteristics and traffic volume details collected for a selected stretch in Bangalore that is one of the major black spot locations of the city. The selected best fit model had an excellent coefficient of determination (R 2 adj = 0.967), encompassing the crucial variables such as carriageway width, shoulder type, number of minor crossings, land use, road condition, average speed of traffic stream and composition of trucks. It is envisioned that this study will help recommend the significant safety measures that need to be adopted by the transportation planners in designing a safer road user environment.

2017

Every road accident is important. Investigating the road accidents and their causes is the main action to be conducted in the prevention and the prediction stages. The main aim of the paper is to investigate the state-of-the-art regarding road accidents research in Romania, one of the top country in the EU Road Death Statistics. It came out that there is an inconsistent research conducted in the country, with very few studies which were spread across different fields, along with a major lack in accident prediction methods. The study provides a starting point for the accident prediction by validating an international model which could be employed in Romania. The specific goal of the paper is to investigate the impact of the traffic volumes on the accidents occurrence. The traffic data were provided by the National Road Infrastructure Management Company (CNAIR). The road accident data were provided by the Traffic Department of the General Inspectorate of Romanian Police (GIRPTD) and i...

2016

The PRACT Project (Predicting Road ACcidents a Transferable methodology across Europe) is an ongoing project aimed at developing a European accident prediction model structure that could, with proper calibration, be applied to different European road networks. The core principles behind the PRACT project structure are that:  it is unrealistic to think that one unique Accident Prediction Model (APM) model with a unique set of Crash Modification Factors (CMFs) can actually be developed, valid for all Europe and for all the different type of networks;  the development of a specific APM model and a set of CMFs based on local data is extremely time consuming and expensive and requires data and experience that most road administrations do not have;  the development of “local” CMFs only based on historical local data prevents the possibility of evaluating the effectiveness of new technologies. The PRACT project addresses these issues by developing a practical guideline and a user friend...

International Journal of Safety and Security Engineering, 2017

The impact of risk associated with traffic is rarely included in the evaluation of projects for increasing urban traffic fluency, although the social costs of traffic crashes are estimated as very high. Lately, more frequently, the risk associated with urban road traffic is included, as a supplementary criterion, in the selection of the best urban planning scenarios, in order to a-priory minimize the number of crashes. Therefore, we aim to develop tools to enable the analysis of different intrinsic factors (characteristics of urban area and of road network) on traffic safety performances. The paper presents an analysis of the traffic crashes registered in Bucharest in the period 2008-2014. Following the analysis, the highest values of the average number of crashes were identified for signalized intersections that include tram infrastructure. Hence, the study is continued for this category of network features for which a model to estimate traffic crashes is proposed.

PROMET - Traffic&Transportation, 2016

Over the last three decades numerous research efforts have been conducted worldwide to determine the relationship between traffic accidents and traffic and road characteristics. So far, the mentioned studies have not been carried out in Serbia and in the region. This paper represents one of the first attempts to develop accident prediction models in Serbia. The paper provides a comprehensive literature review, describes procedures for collection and analysis of the traffic accident data, as well as the methodology used to develop the accident prediction models. The paper presents models obtained by both univariate and multivariate regression analyses. The obtained results are compared to the results of other studies and comparisons are discussed. Finally, the paper presents conclusions and important points for future research. The results of this research can find theoretical as well as practical application.

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2002

Accident prediction models, also known as safety performance functions, have several important uses in modern-day safety analysis. Unfortunately, calibration of these models is not straightforward. A research effort was undertaken that demonstrates the complexity of calibrating these models for urban intersections. These complexities relate to the specification of the functional form, the accommodation of the peculiarities of accident data, and the transferability of models to other jurisdictions. Toronto data were used to estimate models for three- and four-legged signalized and unsignalized intersections. Then the performance of these models was compared with that of models for Vancouver and California that were recalibrated for Toronto using a procedure recently proposed for the application in the Interactive Highway Safety Design Model (IHSDM). The results of this transferability test are mixed, suggesting that a single calibration factor as is currently specified in the IHSDM p...

MATEC web of conferences, 2018

Transportation Research Procedia, 2016

The PRACT Project (Predicting Road ACcidents-a Transferable methodology across Europe) is an ongoing project aimed at developing a European accident prediction model structure that could, with proper calibration, be applied to different European road networks. The core principles behind the PRACT project structure are that: it is unrealistic to think that one unique Accident Prediction Model (APM) model with a unique set of Crash Modification Factors (CMFs) can actually be developed, valid for all Europe and for all the different type of networks; the development of a specific APM model and a set of CMFs based on local data is extremely time consuming and expensive and requires data and experience that most road administrations do not have; the development of "local" CMFs only based on historical local data prevents the possibility of evaluating the effectiveness of new technologies. The PRACT project addresses these issues by developing a practical guideline and a user friendly tool that will allow for an easier implementation of APMs and CMFs in different countries and on different road networks.