Developing a Safety Effectiveness Evaluation Tool for California

Yanlin Qi, Jia Li and H. Michael PhD Zhang

Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis

Abstract: Crash modification factor (CMF) is an effectiveness measure of safety countermeasures. It is widely used by state agencies to evaluate and prioritize various safety improvement projects. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) CMF Clearinghouse provides CMFs for a broad range of countermeasures, but still, the existing CMFs often cannot meet the needs for characterizing the safety impacts of countermeasures in new scenarios. Developing CMFs, meanwhile, is costly, time-consuming, and requires extensive data collection. A more cost-effective way to provide preliminary CMF estimations is needed. To address this need, this study develops a low-cost and easily extendable data-driven framework for CMF predictions. This framework performs data mining on existing CMF records in the FHWA CMF Clearinghouse. To tackle the heterogeneity of data, interdisciplinary techniques to maintain model compatibility were created and used. The project also integrates multiple machine-learning models to learn the complex hidden relationships between different safety countermeasure scenarios. Finally, the proposed framework is trained against the CMF Clearinghouse data and performs comprehensive evaluations. The results show that the proposed framework can provide CMF predictions for new countermeasure scenarios with reasonable accuracy, with overall mean absolute errors less than 0.2. We also discuss an enhanced approach that leverages structured information in certain CMF descriptions, which can boost the CMF prediction accuracy, showing a mean absolute error less than 0.1 in a case study.

Keywords: Engineering; Crash modification factors; highway safety; data mining; machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ppm
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