The development and use of micro-simulation for traffic safety assessment has been neglected or avoided by the traffic research community due to a number of practical and conceptual problems. These problems emanate largely from the availability of theories and methods that are required to design a representative model of road-user behaviour with enough microscopic detail to generate useful and relevant safety data, and also the difficulties in identifying safety indicators that can be measured through empirical enquiry and used for model validation and calibration. For safety assessment purposes, a model of road-user behaviour must incorporate sufficient behavioural variance to allow for less-than-perfect and erroneous performance. Furthermore, suggested safety indicators must be sensitive to changes in performance and behaviour brought about by use of Intelligent Transport Systems, such as Intelligent Speed Adaptation, which are predicted to have great safety potential in the urban environment. The SINDI-project at the Centre for Traffic Simulation Research in Stockholm focuses on the development and use of micro-simulation software for safety assessment. Emphasis is placed on qualitative and quantitative measures of road-user interaction (e.g. traffic conflicts) in small urban networks, and in particular the possibility to improve urban safety through the use of an ISA-system. For this purpose empirical data has been collected from a specific ISA test site in a small Swedish town using a variety of different measurement techniques. This data will be used in conjunction with micro-simulation in order to estimate projected safety effects at different levels of ISA implementation. For the covering abstract see ITRD E209471.
Abstract