Abstract

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) has completed a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data inventory that includes access locations across the UDOT network. The new data are anticipated to be extremely useful in better defining safety and in completing a systemwide analysis of locations where safety could be improved, or where safety has been improved across the state. The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Brigham Young University (BYU) has worked with the new data to perform a safety analysis of the state related to access management, particularly related to driveway spacing and raised medians. The primary objective of this research was to increase understanding of the safety impacts across the state related to access management. These objectives were accomplished by using the LiDAR database to evaluate driveway spacing and locations to aid in hot spot identification and to develop relationships between access design and location as a function of safety and access category (AC). Utah Administrative Rule R930-6 contains access management guidelines to balance the access found on a roadway with traffic and safety operations. These guidelines were used to find the maximum number of driveways recommended for a roadway. ArcMap 10.3 and Microsoft Excel were used to visualize the data and identify hot spot locations. An analysis conducted in this study compared current roadway characteristics to the R930-6 guidelines to find locations where differences occurred. This analysis does not indicate the current AC is incorrect; it simply means that the assigned AC does not meet current roadway characteristic based on the LiDAR data analysis. UDOT can decide what this roadway will become in the future and help shape each segment using the AC outlined in the R930-6. A hierarchal Bayesian statistical before-after model, created in previous BYU safety research, was used to analyze locations where raised medians have been installed. Twenty locations where raised medians were installed in Utah between 2002 to 2014 were used in this model. The model analyzed the raised medians by AC. Only three AC were represented in the data. Regression plots depicting a decrease in crashes before and after installation, posterior distribution plots showing the probability of a decrease in crashes after installation, and crash modification factor (CMF) plots presenting the CMF values estimated for different vehicle miles traveled (VMT) values were all created as output from the before-after model. Overall, installing a raised median gives an approximate reduction of 53 percent for all crashes. Individual AC analysis yielded results ranging from 32 to 44 percent for all severity groups except severity 4 and 5. When the model was only run for crash severity 4 and 5, a larger reduction of 57 to 58 percent was found.

Degree

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Civil and Environmental Engineering

Rights

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