Road safety reviews of existing roads are becoming an accepted practice in many agencies today. There have been various efforts in providing transportation professionals with tools to consider such safety information explicitly when managing transportation systems. However, few studies have investigated the value of the safety information from the perspective of travelers. This study aims to explore the impact of delivering road safety information to travelers on network performance, especially traffic safety. In this paper the primary efforts made to achieve this objective are two-fold: development of road risk indices (RRIs) for travelers using the best available accident prediction models and evaluation of the benefits from such actions on the network level through a micro-simulation. Also, the details of implementation of the proposed RRIs and simulation, including an adopted crash prediction model and travelers' route choice model, are discussed. The simulation was implemented in MATLAB where a hypothetical case study on a rural two-lane highway network, along with a factorial experimenton key parameters, was performed. The results in the case study indicate that providing travelers with information on RRIs can significantly improve traffic safety with a limited increase travel time at the aggregated level.
Abstract