Highway Safety

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Highway Safety

Highway Safety

Abstract

The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) introduces a science-based technical approach that takes the guesswork out of safety analysis. The HSM provides tools to conduct quantitative safety analyses, allowing for safety to be quantitatively evaluated alongside other transportation performance measures such as traffic operations, environmental impacts, and construction costs.

For example, the HSM provides a method to quantify changes in crash frequency as a function of cross-sectional features. With this method, the expected change in crash frequency of different design alternatives can be compared with the operational benefits or environmental impacts of these same alternatives. As another example, the costs of constructing a left-turn lane on a two-lane rural road can be compared to the safety benefits in terms of reducing a certain number of crashes.

Conclusion

This project aims to compile the best available data for a comprehensive list of countermeasures and their respective crash reduction factors for ODOT to use in their  transportation safety planning and engineering. The final database product will provide ODOT and local Oregon agencies with an easily searchable reference base for looking up  the available data on a wide range of countermeasures. The new flexible database design  will include a notation for the reliability of the research and will be as specific as possible  regarding crash reduction factors and the crash types to which they apply. Actual results  from applying these countermeasures should be expected to vary according to specific circumstances of their application.