The main objective of this study was to evaluate the safety effects caused by altering the lengths of deceleration and acceleration lanes at rest areas on expressways in Korea. Although general conclusions can be found through crash-based safety analysis, to examine more specific optimal conditions considering various traffic conditions, this study proposes a novel framework to explore and evaluate crash-based and simulation-based safety performances. For this purpose, the safety performance function (SPF) and crash modification factor (CMF) were developed to reflect real-world safety impacts. To consider nonlinear trends of the parameters, nonlinearizing link functions were introduced into the analysis. Two types of simulation analyses were conducted to (1) find the combination of surrogate safety measures (SSMs) that best fit with the crash-based safety performance results and (2) determine the optimal lengths of deceleration lane and acceleration lanes for different traffic conditions. The results showed that the best length of deceleration lane of a rest area is between 240 and 260 m, depending on the traffic conditions. The results also indicated that the optimal length of acceleration lane of a rest area is between 385 and 400 m, depending on the traffic parameters. The findings of this study could be used to determine the safety solutions with a micro-traffic simulator.
Truck platooning, which is a cluster of trucks in support of vehicle-to-vehicle communication and automated longitudinal vehicle control, is a promising method to both operational efficiency and prevent traffic crashes. Although a variety of studies have been conducted to identify the effects of vehicle platooning on traffic stream, we are not aware of any study attempting to identify promising road segments for vehicle platooning. This study aims to develop a methodology for determining the priority of freeway segments that would potentially lead to maximize the effectiveness of truck platooning. Evaluation measures derived in this study includes truck crash rates, the percentage of truck traffic, segment length, and the number of entry and exit points. Weighting values obtained from an analytical hierarchical process (AHP) method were applied to compute the proposed priority score to determine better freeway segment for truck platooning. Results suggested that a 46.9km freeway segment, from Sacheon IC to Sanin JC, was the most promising segment for maximizing the effectiveness of truck platooning. It is expected that the outcome of this study would be effectively used as a fundamental to establish operational strategies for truck platooning.
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