Published In

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2011

Subjects

Traffic safety, Roads, Safety measures

Abstract

The recently released "Highway Safety Manual" (HSM) published by AASHTO provides a comprehensive set of tools for evaluating and identifying opportunities to improve safety for highway facilities. Included in the HSM is a quantitative method for predicting crashes on the basis of recently developed scientific approaches. These predictive methods currently exist for three facility types: rural two-lane roads; rural multilane highways; and urban and suburban arterial highways. To enhance precision, each HSM predictive method should be calibrated for location conditions. This paper demonstrates the HSM calibration procedure for total crashes in Oregon. The research identified three critical data collection limitations on information about pedestrian volumes, minor road traffic volumes at rural locations, and minimum sample size for underrepresented crash locations. Most of the calibration factors for Oregon were determined to be considerably lower than the expected value of approximately 1, and this observation was attributed to Oregon crash reporting thresholds and procedures. The paper includes an evaluation of crash severity distribution methods and an assessment of the significance of collision type distributions on the overall predicted crashes.

Rights

Copyright, National Academy of Sciences. Posted with permission of the Transportation Research Board. None of this material may be presented to imply endorsement by TRB of a product, method, practice, or policy.

DOI

10.3141/2241-03

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/20785

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