Surrogate Safety Measures from Traffic Simulation Models

Safety is emerging as an area of increased attention and awareness within transportation engineering. Historically, the safety of new and innovative traffic treatments has been difficult to assess, primarily because of a lack of good predictive models of crash potential and a lack of consensus on what constitutes a safe or unsafe facility. An FHWA-sponsored research project investigated the potential to derive surrogate measures of safety from existing traffic simulation models. These surrogate measures could then be used to support evaluations of various traffic engineering alternatives, including facilities that have not yet been built and strategies that have not yet been used. Each surrogate measure is…

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  Federal Highway Administration