Development of the safety evaluation system for Korea rural highways

Generally, highway design guides provide standard rules to design highways, and the guidelines were generated based on results from many empirical studies and experiences related to highway safety. However, there are lots of vehicle crashes, and some of them occur due to highway design problems even though the highways were built by general design guidelines. It has been known that crashes are mainly caused by human errors not by design problems. Therefore safety evaluation of designed highway layouts using historical safety data is a very important process. Through this study, a safety evaluation system based on historical accident data was developed. First of all, accident prediction models were developed for various types of highways, and then the safety evaluation system which enables to evaluate safety level for designed highways and provide the results using visualized methods. A core of the safety evaluation algorithm is AMFs, which means a relative effect of geometric conditions on frequency of vehicle crashes. Using this system, the highways that will be constructed can be checked whether there is any safety problems or not and solved the problems prior to construction. In addition, as preliminary safety check in the design step is conducted, the additional cost to improve highway conditions after vehicle crashes happened can be reduced.