MARVin - Model for Assessing Risks of Road Infrastructure

The project MARVin is about assessing the relation between road infrastructure and road accidents. A large amount of data about the Austrian roads was gathered with the RoadSTAR (Road Surface Tester of arsenal research). This data was put into a database associated with accident data. The result was a database of about 12.500 km of road where all the road parameters (skid resistance, cross fall, gradient, texture, roughness, curve radius, etc.) belonging to a certain accident can be retrieved. One approach is to take a piece of road where accidents happened and to find a very similar section of road with roughly the same parameters. These pieces of roads can be an interesting lead to reduce the number of accidents caused by road conditions. It could be the case that on a certain part of road a lot of accidents happened while on another segment, very similar in road parameters, no accidents happened at all. In this case there can be other parameters (that are not in the database) that influence the road safety such as speed limits or traffic density etc. MARVin is also planned as an open platform to integrate more relevant data like traffic flow data or weather data. MARVin is a new tool for crash-causes-research, to identify “virtual” road sections with a high crash risk potential or “virtual” hot spots. It is possible to realize route graphs which show all kinds of infrastructure parameters and located accident events. This is a practical tool to audit existing roads as well as planned roads and to develop accident preventive measures in terms of road constructions and road infrastructure. Regarding to the accident risk of powered-two-wheelers (PTWs) the tendency of a significant influence of the road construction and the quality of the road surface on motorcycle accidents, can be shown in the first results of pilot studies and analysis.