Critique of the traffic conflicts technique. Paper presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, January 1977.

A critical examination of the current utility of the traffic conflicts technique is presented, including the evaluation of previous studies and a discussion of recent results of an FHWA study that attempted to develop a rigorous experimental design using traffic conflicts as the basic response variable to measure the effectiveness of implementing various access control techniques. Although some studies have concluded that the traffic conflicts technique is a reliable tool for the prediction of accident potential, a more rigorous data base is needed before the reliability and utility of conflict analysis can be assured.