Highway Safety Analysis: British Columbia Practice

摘要

Traffic collisions represent a major problem on a worldwide basis. Every year, over 1.2 million people die in traffic collisions across the world and between 20 and 50 million are injured or disabled. In most regions of the world this epidemic of road traffic injuries is still increasing. Highway agencies all over the world are paying more and more attentions on highway safety. Highway safety has been taken into account seriously during the project programming and implementation in British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, Canada (BCMOTI). This article describes the BCMOTI highway safety practice, which includes general safety analysis procedure to identify the safety problems, the improvement option generation, and economic analysis for improvement options. Historically, collision rates have been used as the basis for safety analysis. Research has shown that there are limitations with this approach due to the non-linear relationship between collision frequency and exposure. Collision prediction modeling is the recommended technique for estimating road safety in the American Association of State Highway and Transpiration Officials (AASHTO) Highway Safety Manual. The BCMOTI developed her own collision prediction models (CPMs) and collision modification factors (CMFs) to be used to assess highway safety improvements on British Columbia highways. It is believed that the CPMs and CMFs have improved the overall safety performance estimate (safety benefits) for road safety analysis and these outputs serve a valuable purpose with respect to option selection, project ranking and programming.