A PROACTIVE APPROACH TO ASSESS SAFETY LEVEL OF AT-GRADE SIGNALIZED INTERSECTIONS (Paper 710)

Road safety is a growing concern in emerging countries, and intersections are the major points of concern largely due to complex conflicting movements of vehicles and pedestrians. In order to achieve a safe and sustainable traffic infrastructure at intersections, it is necessary to assess safety level of intersections and suggest safety improvement measures. The present work proposes a pro-active approach to evaluate the safety level of at-grade signalized intersections by identifying design and management deficiencies. The methodology includes (i) identification of unsafe acts and causal factors at signalized intersections, (iii) estimation of the weightage of causal factors (iv) fuzzy evaluation of intersections, (v) calculation of safety levels of intersections, and (vi) validation of the safety levels using crash data. While a combination of Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy AHP) and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) was used to estimate the weightage of causal factors, a fuzzy-scoring based expert field investigation was carried out to assess design and management deficiencies at intersections. The methodology was applied to evaluate a few at-grade signalized intersections located along a typical urban corridor in Kolkata city, India. The work presented here is likely to encourage the practitioners to apply the methodology to identify safety deficiencies at intersections and to propose areas of improvement on a priority basis. The study is expected to be of interest to the researchers to adopt similar investigations for improving the safety of facilities in other contexts.