A Simple Way to Improve Road Safety by Avoiding Dangerous Sections of the Route

Abstract

A simple routing algorithm to improve vehicle safety on a road network has been proposed. If the road network is represented by a graph with edges and nodes, it is sufficient to mark edges with highest incidence (top 800) of severe Traffic Accidents (TA) by adding to the attribute of the edge some penalty and the routing algorithm (Dijkstra or Bellman-Ford) will try to avoid these edges automatically. To estimate safety gain, a Relative Risk Ratio RRR = (TAs along route which avoids TA hotspots/TAs along original route) introduced in [1] was used. Computer simulation was performed for Moscow, Russian Federation. It is shown that for the same start and end points of the route, an average RRR gets smaller by 9...31 % depending on original route length. It is also shown that the cost for improving vehicle safety is an increase in the route length (by 6...11 %) and an increase in the number of nodes in the route (by 6...28 %).