An approach to investigate relationship between speed and safety on urban arterials


Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Eskişehir Osmangazi Üniversitesi, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2008

Öğrenci: ZERRİN ARDIÇ EMİNAĞA

Danışman: HEDİYE TÜYDEŞ YAMAN

Özet:

Traffic safety is an important problem in today’s world with increasing number of fatalities and injuries in traffic accidents. For the solution of this problem, determination of accident prone locations on a network and reasons behind is an essential step, which is studied to some extend via different traffic accident analyses in the literature. While major factors affecting accident risk, such as speed, congestion, infrastructural aspects are known, it is still very difficult to figure out the interaction among these factors, due to complexity in the spatial and temporal distribution of the aforementioned factors and traffic network characteristics. While the case of accident analysis on highways is simpler, in case of urban roads, it requires more effort due to more complex traffic networks with quite a number of conflict points and varying flow characteristics. To investigate possible relationships between speed and accident occurrence on urban arterials, a Geographic Information Systems based accident analysis methodology (GIS-TAAM) is developed in this study. This methodology uses time-dependent average link speeds (calculated from GPS-based data) and accident history of links, and three safety measures in thematic accident maps: i) total number of accident, ii) a severity index based on number of fatality and injury accidents, and iii) an alternative severity index based on total number of fatalities and injuries. The implementation of the proposed methodology and its deliverables are discussed over a pilot study on İnönü Boulevard Eskişehir Road, Ankara.