This article describes a four-step procedure that officials can take to improve traffic safety in urban areas. It uses as an example setting on theLeesburg Pike, a major arterial in suburban Fairfax County, Virginia, close to Washington, D.C. The article relates how transportation researchers are working on a program to improve safety for the Pike and how they are using raw data taken from police reports on accident patterns along major traffic arteries to analyze problem areas. The data is used to compile and classify patterns in accord with the nature of the accident. Following this, researchers cluster the accidents into a diagram, compare the data to the expected number of crashes, and then determine which sort of accident is overrepresented in each location. Once this data is assembled, officialsthen implement the crash reduction measures and the researchers compare the post-reduction crash data with pre-reduction data to ensure that their implementations were effective.
Abstract