Reckoning Level of Risk and Severity (LORS) Based on the Gap Acceptance at a Three-Legged Uncontrolled Intersection of a Rural Highway

Abstract

Traffic safety assessment is an essential part of traffic planning and engineering. At uncontrolled intersections, the severity of crashes has increased manifolds. This is due to the fact of not following the priority rule during the right-turning movements. In conventional methods, past accident records were used to analyze traffic safety. However, the drawbacks of the traditional method to estimate the severity require a lot of accident data for analysis to draw any conclusion and suggest safety measures. The accuracy of the record of accidents and details is highly uncertain. Therefore, surrogate safety measures are being used to analyze the safety. In the present paper, the gap acceptance time (GT) is used to examine the risk and the speed and gap values define the level of risk and severity (LORS). Moreover, using the value of the critical gap, the probability of risk is estimated. Further, the level of risk and severity is computed based on the gap and speed data of vehicles at an uncontrolled intersection. Hence, with the speed and gap data, the level of risk and severity is classified as low risk, high risk and low severe, and high severe. The methodology implemented is validated by using the actual accident data.

Keywords

• gap acceptance
• severity
• safety
• probability of risk
• uncontrolled intersection
• conflicting speed