Safety Evaluation for Expressways: A Comparative Study for Macroscopic and Microscopic Indicators

Abstract

Objective: This article is to assess the performance of 3 macroscopic safety indicators (speed, speed dispersion, and volume) and two microscopic potential crash risks (time to collision and deceleration rate to avoid crash) on safety evaluation for expressways.

Methods: Field data were collected at 3 locations for 4 different time periods on an expressway in Beijing, China. The speed of each vehicle, headway time, and vehicle length were recorded by a traffic management system. The 5 safety indicators were thus calibrated on the basis of the collected data. Further, consistency and comparative analyses were applied to assess the performance of indicators.

Results: According to the analyses, speed dispersion was a better predictor of the two microscopic potential risks compared to the two macroscopic indicators.

Conclusions: Speed dispersion is recommended to proactively assess road safety because (1) it provides consistent risk evaluation with microscopic potential risks and (2) it makes data collection easier.

Keywords:

• safety evaluation
• time to collision
• deceleration rate to avoid crash

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by the Griffith University CIEM Seed Fund scheme and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51208462). The authors are indebted to two anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved this article.