The evaluation of road safety performancesin urban areas

Abstract

The state of road accidents in Romania, especially in urban areas, underlines theneed for research on identifying the appropriate measures for road safetyenhancement. In this paper we present the results of research on road safety,specific to urban areas and to Bucharest City. The first part of the paperdescribes the structure of the model developed for evaluation of road safetyperformances in urban areas for different traffic intensity patterns. The initiallevel of modelling includes procedures for the representation of the macroscopicurban road network, starting from the representation of the digital urban area,with junctions and street sections classified according to their capacity andfunctionality. The second level of the model contains functions for estimating thesafety performance of the urban transport network. Each category of elementswith low safety performance is analysed, taking into account the physicalnetwork characteristics, the traffic flow intensity and accidents statistics. Thesecond part of the paper presents the definition and calibration of the safetyperformance function for sections of the urban road network from Bucharest.The set of defined safety performance functions will be a useful tool foridentifying the possible solutions and measures for safety enhancement. © 2014 WIT Press.