MODELING HIGHWAY GEOMETRIC DESIGN CONSISTENCY USING OPERATING SPEED AND SAFETY DATA

The road-safety is one of the most important priorities of socio-economic policy of E.U. which advanced several programs for enhancing and improving safety Standard in the member Countries. A road alignment that reflects the driver prospects can help increase the likelihood of drivers to respond to particular situations and information correctly and quickly. By understanding the most influent crash factors and how they might influence the sequence of events, crashes and crash severities can be reduced by implementing specific measures. One of the parameters to most influence a safe driving is the operating speed. If the real operating speed recorded by drivers differs from that expected by the engineer, the following can happen: drivers do not travel safely and comfortably or are not satisfied, and the operational costs and travel time are different from those estimated. This research aims to provide integrated procedures to investigate the relationships between road alignment design consistency and crash risk factors on two lane rural roads to overcome the limitations of the existing models and to identify accurate countermeasures for safety management process.