Integrating Vulnerable Road User Safety Criteria into Transportation Asset Management to Prioritize Budget Allocation at the Network Level

Carlos M. Chang, Marketa Vavrova and Syeda Lamiya Mahnaz
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Carlos M. Chang: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Florida International University, 10555 W. Flagler Street, EC124, Miami, FL 33174, USA
Marketa Vavrova: Independent Researcher, El Paso, TX 79968, USA
Syeda Lamiya Mahnaz: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Florida International University, 10555 W. Flagler Street, EC124, Miami, FL 33174, USA

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 14, 1-17

Abstract: Safety is a major worldwide concern due to the increasing number of fatalities of vulnerable road users (VRUs). VRUs are pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists, and their safety is a priority when making infrastructure management decisions. Traditionally, transportation agencies have adopted transportation asset management (TAM) practices based on performance measures to assess the physical condition of transport infrastructure. This paper describes a framework to incorporate VRU’s safety into the TAM decision-making process. The main objective of the VRU-TAM framework is to mitigate pedestrian fatalities by improving the decision-making process at the strategic and operational management level. The VRU-TAM framework is composed of four phases: assessment, prioritization, scenario analysis, and results. It includes a prioritization methodology using a safety-weighted effectiveness ratio (SWER) to consider pedestrian safety factors and costs in the decision-making process. In a broader perspective, pedestrian safety is affected by driver, demographic, pedestrian, infrastructure, and policy related factors. The decision-making criteria reflected in SWER considers the asset importance, location, pedestrian safety risk, costs, and remaining life in the budget allocation process, and adopts the dynamic bubble up (DBU) technique for budget prioritization at the network level. An example is presented for crosswalks to demonstrate the applicability of the methodology to evaluate different budget-driven scenarios for funding allocation. As a conclusion, it is demonstrated that the outcomes of the budget-driven scenarios following the method that incorporates safety criteria, with tangible metrics, offer a deeper understanding of the effects of budgetary constraints on backlog costs and the remaining life of infrastructure assets.

Keywords: vulnerable road user; transportation asset management; safety; sustainable transportation; budget allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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