Development of the Safety Evaluation System for Korea Rural Highways

摘要

Generally, highway design guides provide standard rules to design highways, and the guidelineswere generated based on results from many empirical studies and experiences related tohighway safety. However, there are lots of vehicle crashes, and some of them occur due tohighway design problems even though the highways were built by general design guidelines. Ithas been known that crashes are mainly caused by human errors not by design problems.Therefore safety evaluation of designed highway layouts using historical safety data is a veryimportant process.Through this study, a safety evaluation system based on historical accident data wasdeveloped. First of all, accident prediction models were developed for various types ofhighways, and then the safety evaluation system which enables to evaluate safety level fordesigned highways and provide the results using visualized methods. A core of the safetyevaluation algorithm is AMFs, which means a relative effect of geometric conditions onfrequency of vehicle crashes. Using this system, the highways that will be constructed can bechecked whether there is any safety problems or not and solved the problems prior toconstruction. In addition, as preliminary safety check in the design step is conducted, theadditional cost to improve highway conditions after vehicle crashes happened can be reduced.