Paper Details

TRB 90th Annual Meeting (January 23-27, 2011)

Event Number:	326
Event Title:	Advancements in Quantification of Highway Safety Performance
Event Date:	Jan 24 2011 2:30PM- 5:00PM
Event Location:	Marriott, Salon 2
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Calibration of Highway Safety Manual Predictive Models for Oregon State Highways (11-3993)

The recently released Highway Safety Manual (HSM), published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), provides a comprehensive set of tools for evaluating and identifying opportunities to improve safety for highway facilities. Included in the HSM is a quantitative method for predicting crashes based on recently developed scientific approaches. These predictive methods currently exist for three specific facility types: rural two-lane roads; rural multilane highways; and urban and suburban arterial highways. To enhance precision, each HSM predictive method should be calibrated for location conditions. This paper demonstrates the HSM calibration procedure for total crashes in Oregon. The research identified three critical data collection issues including information about pedestrian volumes, minor road traffic volumes at rural locations, and minimum sample size for under-represented crash locations. The authors also determined that most of the calibration factors for Oregon are considerably lower than expected values of approximately one and attributed this observation to Oregon crash reporting thresholds and procedures. The paper also includes an evaluation of crash severity distribution methods as well as assesses the significance of collision type distributions on the overall predicted crashes.

Authors
     Xie, Fei , Oregon State University
     Gladhill, Kristie , Portland State University
     Dixon, Karen K., Texas A&M Transportation Institute
     Monsere, Christopher M., Portland State University