Speed dispersion is recommended to proactively assess road safety because (1) it provides consistent risk evaluation with microscopic potential risks and (2) it makes data collection easier.
With the merit on representing traffic conflict through examining the crash mechanism and causality proactively, crash surrogate measures have long been proposed and applied to evaluate the traffic safety. However, the driver’s Perception-Reaction Time (PRT), an important variable in crash mechanism, has not been considered widely into surrogate measures. In this regard, it is important to know how the PRT affects the performances of surrogate indicators. To this end, three widely used surrogate measures are firstly modified by involving the PRT into their crash mechanisms. Then, in order to examine the difference caused by the PRT, a comparative study is carried out on a freeway section of the Pacific Motorway, Australia. This result suggests that the surrogate indicators’ performances in representing rear-end crash risks are improved with the incorporating of the PRT for the investigated section.
In this paper, we aim to examine the relationship between traffic flow and potential conflict risks by using crash surrogate metrics. It has been widely recognized that one traffic flow corresponds to two distinct traffic states with different speeds and densities. In view of this, instead of simply aggregating traffic conditions with the same traffic volume, we represent potential conflict risks at a traffic flow fundamental diagram. Two crash surrogate metrics, namely, Aggregated Crash Index and Time to Collision, are used in this study to represent the potential conflict risks with respect to different traffic conditions. Furthermore, Beijing North Ring III and Next Generation SIMulation Interstate 80 datasets are utilized to carry out case studies. By using the proposed procedure, both datasets generate similar trends, which demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology and the transferability of our conclusions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.