Risk Analysis for a Four-Lane Rural Highway Based on Safety Audit

Abstract

With over 5.4 lakh kilometres of roads and the number of motor vehicles that have crossed the mark of 2.1 lakh thousand in 2015 along with urbanisation, road crashes emerge as complementary. But the fact that the number of crashes and injuries has dropped and on the contrary, the fatalities and severity of accident have inflated by 4.7% in 2016 with respect to the previous year, the severity is the factor that has been rising. Thus, the study focuses on determining Risk Index by proactive measure for rural highway which is a quantified value based on various factors such as exposure, crash severity and probability, as per various researchers. The study was carried out only on National Highway with reliable accident data as they are major contributors to road crashes, i.e. one-third of total crashes occur on National Highways which constitute only 2% of the road network in India. The factors such as geometric design and road infrastructure are considered for Safety Index calculation and further, the validation is based upon the historically available authentic accident data. The study results show a good correlation between ranking of the road segments as per Risk Index and based upon available road accident data. This validated technique can be used to determine risk on the road without relying on the unreliable accident data and safety measures can be incorporated on the road segments as per priority which is determined based upon the Risk Index of the highway segments.