A simple and manageable methodology that is capable of assessing the global risk of road transportation of hazardous materials is proposed. A transportation risk index (TRI) is first defined as the product of impact radius, transport frequency, incident probability, and release probability. The TRI has the unit of impact radius in km per year per million of vehicle kilometer. Its calculation is more amiable for the risk analysis of large area with multiple chemicals and transportation routes compared with the typical societal risk. Upon the completion of calculation of the TRI for every transport routes in the selected area, the total risk is obtained by summing overlapped TRI in the GIS platform. A contour is then generated, also performed directly in the GIS platform, and then map directly on the GIS map to give the final risk potential map. The National Freeway 1 in Taiwan with a total length of 370 km is used as an example to illustrate the methodology. The freeway is divided into 37 sections based on intersections. The historical incident related data are collected for each section. The highest risk area as analyzed by the method is found to match reasonably well with the incident records of past 10 years.
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