Wen Chen,Xuesong Wang,Anderson Kekoa
Abstract:Among the multitude of hazardous location identification methods proposed in the past, one of the disagreements remaining unresolved is regarding which kind of criterion should be employed to identify the hot spots, the accident number, or the accident reduction potential. Rather than favor either of the criteria, the authors proposed a methodology combining the two criteria to conduct HSID. To improve the identification accuracy, the well accepted empirical Bayesian technique is used to compute the expected accident number and accident reduction potential. In addition, the confidence levels are also adopted to guard against the uncertainties revolving around the estimated values. The methodology was applied to four functional classifications of road sections in Arizona. The results have illustrated the great advantages of this methodology over alternative identification methods.