Analysis of Surrogate Safety Performance Parameters for an Interurban Corridor

Abstract

Traditionally, road safety performance evaluation is an analysis of crash data from the past. However, methods of analysis from crash data have some well-known limitations from an analytical point of view. These limitations include small data samples causing statistical issues in analysis, under reporting of crashes and very little information about behavioral and environmental aspects at crash time. The micro simulation combined with traffic conflict technique enables the transportation engineers to investigate the safety performance of a corridor without using the crash data. Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM), utilizes simulated vehicle trajectories from the micro simulation software to investigate conflict severity and locations. In this study, safety performance evaluation is carried out of an interurban corridor of 24.3 km stretch from Gurugram to Faridabad in state of Haryana (India) using simulation software VISSIM (Verkehr In Städten – SIMulationsmodell) and SSAM. Simulated vehicular trajectories were generated and analyzed using SSAM to identify potential conflicts. The surrogate safety measures Time to Collision (TTC), Post Encroachment Time (PET) and Max ΔV are obtained by an analysis from SSAM model for all the three homogeneous sections such as midblock, curve section and intersections separately. The approach presented in the paper helps in the identification of inter-urban corridor locations prone to road crashes and hence serves as a proactive alternative as opposed to historical crashes based analyses.