Surrogate Safety Measures from Traffic Simulation Models

Book excerpt: "This project investigates the potential for deriving surrogate measures of safety from existing microscopic traffic simulation models for intersections. The process of computing the measures in the simulation, extracting the required data, and summarizing the results is denoted as the Surrogate Safety Assessment Methodology. These surrogate measures could then be used to support traffic engineering alternatives evaluation with respect to safety for both signalized and unsignalized intersections. The report describes the five main activities of this project: (1) review of previous work in modeling of safety at traffic facilities (focusing on intersection safety modeling) using surrogate measures, (2) survey of the capabilities of existing traffic simulation models to support derivation of surrogate measures of safety, (3) identification of use cases and functional requirements for a surrogate safety assessment tool that interacts with traffic simulation model outputs, (4) specification of algorithms for calculating surrogate measures of safety appropriate for intersections, and (5) suggestions for validation activities to support the analysis potential for surrogate measures and compare surrogate measures from simulation models with field data and previous safety studies"--Technical report documentation page.