Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	498
Event Title:	Improved Safety Through Better Design for All Users
Event Date:	Jan 24 2012 8:30AM- 10:15AM
Event Location:	Shoreham, Blue Room Foyer
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Risk Rating Procedure for Assessing Driveway Configurations (12-4267)

The placement and design of driveway and median configurations and their relative orientation can intuitively be expected to have a direct influence on vehicle operations and safety; however, currently there is not an analytical method available that permits the direct consideration of traffic movements, vehicle paths, stopping sight distance, and their associated impact on safety. This paper presents a quantitative procedure that can numerically evaluate the various driveway and median configurations by establishing an index that is adjusts all crashes to an equivalent 55 mph head-on collision. This procedure considers the individual level of conflicts based on relative speed, vehicle orientation, and vehicle or driveway proximity. The authors further associated the traffic volume and expected conflicts for vehicle diverge, crossing, and merge maneuvers to ultimately develop a risk assessment index. Throughout the paper, a simple example application is presented. The paper concludes with a second, more detailed example of how this risk assessment index can be used to compare expected exposure to risk for different intersection configurations.

Authors
     Dixon, Karen K., Texas A&M Transportation Institute
     Layton, Robert Davis, Oregon State University