Calibration of safety performance function for crashes on inter-city four lane highways in India

Abstract

There is a significant need to improve the highway safety during roadway planning, design and operations in developing countries like India. To receive appropriate consideration, safety needs to be dealt objectively within the transportation planning and highway design processes. Lack of available tools is a deterrent to quantify safety of a transportation facility during the planning or highway design process. The objective of this paper is to develop safety performance functions considering various elements involved in the planning, design and operation of a section on four-lane National Highway (NH)-58 located in the state of Uttarakhand, India. The mixed traffic on Indian multilane highways comes with a lot of variability within, ranging from different vehicle types to different driver characteristics. This could result in variability in the effect of explanatory variables on crashes across locations. Hence, explanatory variables for highway segment safety analysis considered were geometric characteristics like curvature change rate, slope change rate, transverse slope and traffic characteristics in the form of average daily traffic, light vehicle traffic, light commercial vehicle traffic, heavy vehicle traffic, two-wheelers, non-motorised traffic volume and operating speed were analysed against dependent variable as crash count per 200 m per year. Safety performance functions involving the explanatory variables are calibrated to predict crash frequency using Poisson Weibull technique and crash types are predicted using ordered logit model. Model results suggest that increase in traffic volume leads to higher probability of crash risk and traffic safety is significantly distorted by higher curvature change rate values. © 2015 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.