Characterizing driveway safety is a relevant and relatively complex topic in transportation safety research. This research studied the safety link of driveways abutting Oregon highways and considered various factors proposed in the current literature for design and evaluation of the safety performance of roadside elements. On the basis of two probability samples from rural and urban arterial state highways, this research developed alternative safety performance functions to evaluate the safety impacts of various driveway configurations. These safety performance functions were intended to explore driveway safety beyond the average driveway density treatment commonly encountered in the literature. The statistical models and methodologies in this research are comparable with those in the Highway Safety Manual. The proposed models exhibited different ranges of effects for urban and rural conditions, but type of land use proved a prominent factor for both the urban and the rural models. The analysis showed that roadside safety is influenced mainly by driveways associated with commercial and industrial land uses in the urban environment. Similarly, industrial driveways are more influential for safety than other types in rural environments. In addition, the rural model uncovered a safety connection to clusters of driveways rather than to driveways alone. This research indicated that after driveway land use in rural environments was accounted for, clustered driveways tended to have fewer crashes compared with isolated driveways.
As population and development levels increase in both urban and rural areas, the implementation of access management strategies is vital for creating safe, efficient, and sustainable transportation systems. To meet the changing needs of transportation systems and their users, the accuracy and the applicability of the base assumptions used to develop access management guidelines must be verified. This research effort utilized a driving simulator study to investigate several assumptions related to driver behavior and access management. The simulator study focused on driver perception–reaction time in the vicinity of driveways and driver behavior in response to differing driveway activity types. The results indicated that the average and 85th percentile perception–reaction times for all drivers were 2.8 s and 4.3 s, respectively. Surprisingly, older drivers (age 65 and older) appeared to be more alert and had an 85th percentile perception–reaction time a full second shorter than that of their younger counterparts (3.3 s versus 4.4 s). The researchers also observed that deceleration rates had a curvilinear (not constant) relationship with vehicle speed, and these values were much lower than the accepted AASHTO value of 11.2 ft/s2. Finally, the predominant response to driveway activity was a slowing maneuver, not a stop or a lane change. This finding suggests that sight distance calculations based on an urgent stop may not be the most appropriate metric for determining access spacing guidelines for commercial urban road environments.
The types of data needed to assess the economic impacts of access management treatments on businesses, such as net profits or tax revenue, are difficult to obtain in a consistent and reliable manner. As a result, most research efforts on the topic have used subjective data collected through surveys and interviews, as well as less direct data variables, such as long-term land values. Although these efforts are valuable and insightful, their findings are difficult to apply to small-scale access decisions about a specific parcel of land. It is assumed that the travel time required to access a development is a contributing factor in the decision to patronize a business. Therefore, these travel time values could be a useful measure in evaluating potential effects of access management decisions on specific developments. This study used microsimulation to explore the use of travel time into and out of a corner lot development as a measure of the potential impact of driveway restrictions on business vitality. Results indicated that when only one access point was provided, a driveway on the minor road required less travel time than a driveway on the major road, although the relative difference in travel times decreased as volume decreased. In addition, under many of the scenarios tested, the provision of additional access (either additional driveways or fewer movement restrictions) did not reduce the amount of time required for potential customers to access a corner lot development.
Sponsoring Agency Code Supplementary Notes AbstractThis Report reviews an Oregon research effort to develop an Oregon Access Management Best Practices Manual. In particular, this research effort develops a resource to help transportation professionals quantify safety and operational effects of various access management strategies, provide measurable criteria to evaluate these access management techniques, and identify data collection practices necessary to successfully perform these assessments. It is the expectation that this manual can be used by engineers, decision makers, and educators to help the transportation community better understand the appropriate application of access management strategies and how to quantify benefits of the various access management options.This report includes a literature review of safety and operational benefits for a variety of access management configurations. Included in this benefits summary is information about perceived and measured economic impacts of access management even though they are not explicitly included in the companion manual. In addition, this report summarizes example data for access management through the use of case studies, and includes (in the appendix) a standalone proposed access management best practices manual. The case studies were used to test practicality of acquiring various data elements and are not directly reflected in the manual.17.
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