Evaluation on Safety Maintenance at Freeway Exit Ramp

Abstract

The freeway exit ramp is an important infrastructure, with excessive traffic crashes and conflicts. Many practices have shown that effective safety maintenance enhances safety performance of exit ramps. The paper presents a new model to measure the effectiveness of the safety maintenance. First, a comprehensive index system incorporating factors related to pavement, shoulder, traffic safety and management features, lighting and their components, is designed. Second, a weighted model, which adopts expert investigation method and incorporates forty-eight experienced engineers, is designed to measure system component weights. Third, a data collection method is also designed and applied to thirty freeway exit ramps in order to validate the method. Finally, three evaluation levels, i.e., excellent, good and bad, are measured against twenty-two other freeway exit ramps to validate the model. The results prove that the models outputs are statistically significant to measure safety maintenance at freeway exit ramps.