A SWOV database of road characteristics; State of affairs and further development. This projects aims to develop a database to support research into the relation between road safety and infrastructural and traffic characteristics of road sections and intersections. These relations can be described by crash models (Accident Prediction Models, APMs) and also by effect studies. SWOV has made an inventory of the characteristics of the 80km/h distributor roads in the Dutch provinces of Gelderland and Drenthe. Such an inventory of the entire Dutch road network was not possible within the given time frame and financial resources. Separate from the SWOV inventory, some provincial road authorities (Limburg, Friesland) and the government have conducted their own inventories and compiled a database of these. SWOV checked thecompatibility and reliability of these files. Unfortunately differences in how the road characteristics were defined made it impossible to combine these files with the SWOV files. The SWOV road characteristics database now contains road characteristics of intersections and road sections, traffic volumes on road sections and crashes on road sections and intersections of practically all regional 80 km/h roads in the provinces of Drenthe and Gelderland. The characteristics have been examined in their entirety and the database can now be used to carry out analyses. It should be noted here that there are many road sections with relatively few crashes or no crashes at all. This problem becomes larger as disaggregation increases. This can partly be remedied by including more roads in the database, by increasing the length of the road sections or using a different definition of road sections, and/or by carrying out the analysis over multiple years.
Abstract