TRAFFIC SAFETY PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT AND MULTIVARIATE TREATMENTS FOR INTERSECTION LOCATIONS

There is a need to evaluate the safety performance of road intersections in a vehicle platoon environment. For this purpose, this study attempts to quantify intersection related accidents and develop countermeasures to reduce injuries resulting from such accidents, using the selected data of 3520 casualties over the period 1992-2007 in Harbin. Then the distribution characteristics of accident number and rate via a half experience model are statisticed and find that proportionately 89.15% of total records occurred at unsignalized intersections and the injuries and fatalities account for approximately 62.35% at irregular ones. Using techniques of linear regression, several different explanatory models are constructed to identify the factors associated with annual average daily traffic, junction numbers and volume/capacity and thus 3 stages are classified in response to diverse risk level. Moreover, we developed a pedestrian risk factor to quantity the crossing risk around intersection locations, due to pedestrian are more likely to be at-fault in accidents, and 8 roads in Harbin, including Hongqi Str., Nanzhi Rd., etc., are consequently detected with higher crosswalk risk. For safety enhancement approaches, effective measures are proposed to be a combination of facilities improvement, intelligent transportation system application, enforcement and educational programs implemented for both drivers, pedestrians and other users to reduce the overall number of crashes and provide a safer traffic environment.