Safety Performance Functions for Traffic Signals:Phasing and Geometry

A significant proportion of urban crashes,especially serious and fatal crashes,occur at traffic signals.Many of the black-spots in both Australia and New Zealand cities occur at high volume and/or high-speed traffic signals.Given this,crash reduction studies often focus on the major signalised intersections.However,there is limited information that links the phasing configuration,degree of saturation and overall cycle time to crashes.While a number of analysis tools are available for assessing the efficiency of intersections,there are very few tools that can assist engineers in assessing the safety effects of intersection upgrades and new intersections.Safety performance functions have been developed to help quantify the safety impact of various traffic signal phasing configurations and level of intersection congestion at low and high-speed traffic signals in New Zealand and Australia.Data from 238 signalised intersection sites in Auckland,Wellington,Christchurch,Hamilton,Dunedin and Melbourne was used to develop crash prediction models for key crash-causing movements at traffic signals.Different variables(road features)effect each crash type.The models indicate that the safety of intersections can be improved by longer cycle times and longer lost inter-green times,especially all-red time,using fully protected right turns and by extending the length of right turn bays.The exception is at intersections with lots of pedestrians where shorter cycle times are preferred as pedestrian crashes increase with longer wait times.A number of factors have a negative impact on safety including,free left turns,more approach lanes,intersection arms operating near or over capacity in peak periods and higher speed limits.

International transferability of macro-level safety performance functions: a case study of the United States and Italy

Safety performance functions(SPFs),or crash-prediction models,have played an important role in identifying the factors contributing to crashes,predicting crash counts and identifying hotspots.Since a great deal of time and effort is needed to estimate an SPF,previous studies have sought to determine the transferability of particular SPFs;that is,the extent to which they can be applied to data from other regions.Although many efforts have been made to examine micro-level SPF transferability,few studies have focused on macro-level SPF transferability.There has been little transferability analysis of macro-level SPFs in the international context,especially between western countries.This study therefore evaluates the transferability of SPFs for several states in the USA(Illinois,Florida and Colorado)and for Italy.The SPFs were developed using data from counties in the United States and provincias in Italy,and the results revealed multiple common significant variables between the two countries.Transferability indexes were then calculated between the SPFs.These showed that the Italy SPFs for total crashes and bicycle crashes were transferable to US data after calibration factors were applied,whereas the US SPFs for total and bicycle crashes,with the exception of the Colorado SPF,could not be transferred to the Italian data.On the other hand,none of the pedestrian SPFs developed was transferable to other countries.This paper provides insights into the applicability of macro-level SPFs between the USA and Italy,and shows a good potential for international SPF transferability.Nevertheless,further investigation is needed of SPF transferability between a wider range of countries.