Traffic Safety Benefits of Using Highway Lighting Technology: (Case Study: 4-Lanes Expressways in the Rural Areas)

Abstract

Highway Lighting (HL) is designed and implemented on the transportation system for expected societal, safety and security reasons. The use of Technologies such as LED lighting and the solar power can encourage many transportation agencies to implement the Highway Lighting on their roads, especially on the rural roads where there are difficulties to connect the power, also it known that the typical Highway Lighting is need a lot of energy. The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the safety effectiveness of the implementation of highway lighting on the Night-Time Crashes on 4-Lanes expressways in the rural areas. An advanced Cross-Sectional method was used to evaluate the effect of adding highway lighting on the safety performance of expressways as a major part of the transportation system. The data was carefully selected and only expressways with 4-lanes were chosen because there were enough treated and reference segments for them. In the Cross-sectional models, a total number of 22 treated segments and 155 untreated segment located on the 4-lanes expressways in Florida State were used. The results showed that adding HL has a positive effect on Crash reduction for the night-time Crashes (all crash types and all severity levels) by an approximately 30 percent. The night-time fatal and serious injury crashes were reduced by 27 percent while the Non-Injury crashes were reduced by 21 percent. Overall, implementing HL technologies is highly encouraged especially on the rural roads to improve safety and security. The Crash Modification Factors developed would help transportation officials to benefit from the extensive research in adding highway lighting to the road network, especially on expressways by providing quantitative information on crash analysis and evaluation for decision making in planning, design, operation, and maintenance.