Development of comprehensive accident models for two lane rural highways using exposure, geometry, consistency and context variables

In Europe, approximately 60% of road accident fatalities occur on two-lane rural roads. Thus, research to develop and enhance explanatory and predictive models for this road type continues to be of interest in mitigating these accidents. To this end, this paper describes a novel and extensive data collection and modeling effort to define accident models for two-lane road sections based on a unique combination of exposure, geometry, consistency and context variables directly related to the safety performance. The first part of the paper documents how these were identified for the segmentation of highways into homogeneous sections. Next, is a description of the extensive data collection effort that utilized differential cinematic GPS surveys to define the horizontal alignment variables, and road safety inspections (RSIs) to quantify the other road characteristics related to safety. The final part of the paper focuses on the calibration of models for estimating the expected number of accidents on homogeneous sections that can be characterized by constant values of the explanatory variables. Several candidate models were considered for calibration using the Generalized Linear Modeling (GLM) approach. After considering the statistical significance of the parameters related to exposure, geometry, consistency and context factors, and goodness of fit statistics, 19 models were ranked and three were selected as the recommended models. The first of the three is a base model, with length and traffic as the only predictor variables; since these variables are the only ones likely to be available network-wide, this base model can be used in an empirical Bayesian calculation to conduct network screening for ranking “sites with promise” of safety improvement. The other two models represent the best statistical fits with different combinations of significant variables related to exposure, geometry, consistency and context factors. These multiple variable models can be used, with caution, and in conjunction with results from other studies, to derive accident modification factors for these variables for design applications, and in safety assessment for smaller samples of sites for which these variables can be assembled with relative ease.