Highway safety analysis and transportation system simulation share a wide spectrum of spatial and temporal resolutions. At the very fine level of space, forensic engineering techniques for accident reconstruction are applied to individual vehicles and their components, the analysis of conflicts among vehicles and traffic streams operates at the level of roadway intersections and segments of highways, risk assessments as hot spots operate at the level of a city or even higher geographical subdivisions. Similarly along the time dimension we have analyses of second by second movements, time of day of accident occurrence, weekly and monthly accident analysis, and the accident involvement and severity in the life span of individuals. Safety analysis also considers social determinants of accident occurrence and risk as well as perception and attitudes towards risk. Geosimulation and activity microsimulation (activity analysis herein) are also developed at similar levels of spatio-temporal multiplicity to study interactions among persons and to develop synoptic measures of quality of life, transportation system performance, and policy impact analysis. As one would expect there are many potential opportunities for synergy between these two fields of research and practice. On the one hand, activity analysis offers a tremendous amount of data about determinants of accident risk and background information where and when accidents occur. Safety analysis can also gain from a modelling movement to finer social, spatial, and temporal resolution for assessing accident risk in a more detailed, comprehensive, and informative way. On the other hand, perception of risk and attitudes toward risk may inform activity microsimulation in new ways never attempted in the past when theory development and data collection are done with the dual objective of informing safety and activity analysis. In this paper an overview of the methods in the two fields is provided first. This is followed by examples of potential analysis that can be done when merging analytical methods from safety and activity microsimulation. The paper concludes with data collection examples for this type of analysis and a few ideas of next steps in research. (Author/publisher)
Abstract