Transferability of Safety Performance Functions: The Case of Urban Four-Lane Divided Roadways in Muscat

Abstract

The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) initial version provides several safety performances functions (SPFs) that can be used to predict collisions on a roadway network. The calibration of the HSM SPFs for Fatal and Injury (FI), Property Damage Only (PDO), and Total crashes for Urban Four-lane Divided Roadway Segments (U4D) in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, and the development of new SPFs were investigated in this paper. The HSM SPFs were calibrated first with the HSM methodology, and then new forms of specific SPFs were evaluated for Muscat urban roads to determine the best model using the Poisson-Gamma regression technique. The results of this study show that the HSM calibrated SPFs provide the best fit of the data used in this study and would be the best SPFs for predicting collisions in the City of Muscat. The developed collision model describes the mean crash frequency as a function of the natural logarithm of the annual average daily traffic, segment length, and speed limit. Overall, this study provides an important foundation for the implementation of HSM methods in Muscat city, and it may aid in making SPFs established in more developed countries adaptable for use in less developed countries.

Keywords

• model transferability
• developing countries
• urban roadway segments
• safety performance functions
• calibration factors
• negative binomial model