Comparison of the highway safety manual predictive method with safety performance functions based on geometric design consistency

Abstract

[EN] Road safety is a major public health concern in our society. Effective road design and accurate safety analyses must be a component of programs focused on reducing and eliminating roadway injuries and deaths. Various methodologies exist to determine the expected number of crashes on rural two-lane rural roads. This research compares different procedures which allow for the estimation of the number of crashes on homogeneous road segments. In this effort, a total of 27 two-lane rural road sections located in North Carolina were considered, resulting in 59 homogeneous road segments composed of 350 horizontal curves and 375 tangents along 150 km of road. Four methods were applied to the selected roadways: the Highway Safety Manual predictive method, two jurisdiction-specific Safety Performance Functions (SPFs), and a SPF which includes a consistency parameter. This research found that the use of SPFs which incorporate a consistency parameter allows highway engineers to consider human factor impacts on road safety assessment. The use of a consistency parameter can also simplify the crash estimation process. Analysis methods which only included local geometric variables provided unreliable results due to the calibration of only the specific road elements instead of their relationship with other road elements along homogeneous road segments.