Evaluating safety effectiveness of surface treatment at signalised intersections: a before and after study

Abstract

In a metropolitan region of Melbourne, Australia, 136 signalised intersections were identified to have been resurfaced with asphalt over the period 2005–2010. In this study, the safety effectiveness of surface treatment was evaluated using Empirical Bayes (EB) approach to account for regression to the mean bias and traffic volume change through using safety performance function (SPF). Safety effects were estimated for total casualty, high severity (fatality and serious injury) and other injury crashes. For conducting EB method a reference group was selected with similar traffic volumes and site characteristics to the treated sites. Negative Binomial regression was applied to develop SPFs that were used to predict the expected number of crashes at the treated sites. The results of EB approach revealed that the treatment effect was found to be significant at 95% confidence level for all crash severity levels. The evaluation results also showed that total casualty crashes were reduced by 21.3% with a standard error of 3.13% and high severity (fatality and serious injury) crashes were reduced by 15.3% with a standard error of 5.56%. Pavement surface treatment was found to reduce other injury crashes by 21.4% with a standard error of 3.75%.