Estimating vehicle roadside encroachment frequency using accident prediction models

摘要

The existing data to support the development of roadside encroachment- based accident models are extremely limited and largely outdated. Under the sponsorship of the Federal Highway Administration and Transportation Research Board, several roadside safety projects have attempted to address this issue by providing rather comprehensive data collection plans and conducting pilot data collection efforts. It is clear from the results of these studies that the required field data collection efforts will be expensive. Furthermore, the validity of any field collected encroachment data may be questionable because of the technical difficulty to distinguish intentional from unintentional encroachments. This paper proposes an alternative method for estimating the basic roadside encroachment data without actually field collecting them. The method is developed by exploring the probabilistic relationships between a roadside encroachment event and a run-off-the-road event. With some mild assumptions, the method is capable of providing a wide range of basic encroachment data from conventional accident prediction models. To illustrate the concept and use of such a method, some basic encroachment data are estimated for rural two-lane undivided roads. In addition, the estimated encroachment data are compared with the existing collected data. The illustration shows that the method described in this paper can be a viable approach to estimating basic encroachment data without actually collecting them which can be very costly.