Level of Safety on Two-Lane Undivided Rural Highways

Abstract:

Due to the great increase of congestion levels on transportation infrastructures researchers and practitioners have focused on the study of safety performance on road network to identify unsafe locations and assess the effectiveness of different countermeasures introduced at a given site to reduce unacceptable accident risk. Safety performance measures represent an useful tool for evaluating road safety conditions on the basis of objective parameters deducible from the vehicle kinematics. The focus of the present paper is on the assessment of the safety level on two-lane rural highway with a particular attention on rear-end interactions among different pairs of vehicles belonging to the traffic stream. The roadway safety performance study is based on the traffic conflict technique applied to vehicle maneuvers obtained experimentally from a frame by frame analysis of video-taped traffic data. The authors also explored qualitatively the possible relationship between safety level and traffic level of service. This aspect is very important because this kind of roads represents a large part of non-urban highways in many countries.

• Periodical: Applied Mechanics and Materials (Volumes 253-255)
• Pages: 1705-1710
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.253-255.1705
• Online since: December 2012
• Authors: Giuseppe Guido, Alessandro Vitale, Vincenzo Gallelli, Giuseppe Figliomeni
• Keywords: Level of Service, Rear-End Conflict, Road Safety, Two-Lane Undivided Rural Highways

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