Highway Safety
Highway safety engineering is a branch of traffic engineering that deals with reducing the frequency and severity of crashes. It uses physics and vehicle dynamics, as well as road user psychology and human factors engineering, to reduce the influence of factors that contribute to crashes.
A typical traffic safety investigation follows these steps
- 1. Identify and prioritize investigation locations. Locations are selected by looking for sites with higher than average crash rates, and to address citizen complaints.
- 2. Gather data. This includes obtaining police reports of crashes, observing road user behavior, and collecting information on traffic signs, road surface markings, traffic lights and road geometry.
- 3. Analyze data. Look for collisions patterns or road conditions that may be contributing to the problem.
- 4. Identify possible countermeasures to reduce the severity or frequency of crashes.
- • Evaluate cost/benefit ratios of the alternatives
- • Consider whether a proposed improvement will solve the problem, or cause "crash migration." For example, preventing left turns at one intersection may eliminate left turn crashes at that location, only to increase them a block away.
- • Are any disadvantages of proposed improvements likely to be worse than the problem you are trying to solve?
- 5. Implement improvements.
- 6. Evaluate results. Usually, this occurs some time after the implementation. Have the severity and frequency of crashes been reduced to an acceptable level? If not, return to step 2.
Read more about this topic: Traffic Engineering (transportation)
Famous quotes containing the words highway and/or safety:
“The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson’s nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“The Declaration [of Independence] was not a protest against government, but against the excess of government. It prescribed the proper role of government, to secure the rights of individuals and to effect their safety and happiness. In modern society, no individual can do this alone. So government is not a necessary evil but a necessary good.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)