Rajasekhar Basavaraju
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 314
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One goal of transportation safety engineers is to identify and prioritize safety deficient locations along roadways. The identification of such locations allows examination of possible engineering, enforcement, and/or educational measures to improve safety. In general, each state in the U.S. selects its own methodology for identification and prioritization of high crash locations. The Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) annually identifies and then ranks the top 100 high crash locations using a combination of crash frequency, crash rate, and value loss. In the present methodology adopted by Iowa DOT for ranking of high crash locations, the crash database is filtered before the potential high crash locations are ranked. But, the currently used filter seems to inherently favor locations with fatalities. Hence, two new filters with a potential to reduce the bias have been analyzed and the sensitivity analysis of the two filters is explained as part of this thesis. Also, in the current methodology, once the crash database is filtered for the potential high crash locations, three ranking factors, crash frequency, crash rate, and value loss are used for ranking the locations. In the current process, all the three ranking factors are considered equal contributors to the final ranking position of a high crash location. This equal weightage does not seem to be correct. Hence, the impact of different weighting is considered and a sensitivity analysis of twenty-seven new combinations of ranking factors is performed as part of this research.
