Safety Evaluation Approach of Highway Intersection

Highway safety is one of the most important issues in transportation. Intersections are the locations with higher traffic crashes as compared with other highway locations. This paper introduces an approach to evaluate highway intersection safety performance. This approach is fully based on the existing conditions of the intersection, including geometrics, sight distance, pavement surface conditions, traffic control devices, traffic signal timing and phasing, etc. The non-accident based approach is based on field survey to the conditions mentioned before. The approach will also result in a safety index to indicate the safety performance degree of the intersection. Meanwhile, corresponding countermeasures are ranked and recommended based on the cost-benefit analysis. Results from the real application indicate that the approach has good applicability and can be used by field safety engineers in real application.