Program evaluation of highway access with innovative risk-cost-benefit analysis

Abstract

Access management is used to control vehicular ingress and egress to adjacent property, where the main goal is to preserve the safety and capacity of the transportation network. Access management can assist in protecting billions of dollars in current investments in the transportation infrastructure, yet it is common for transportation planners to have limited resources, including budgets, equipment, time, human resources, and others, and thus they need principled approaches for allocating their limited resources across a large network of highways. This research develops a framework that can be used to prioritize competing needs for access management among thousands of access points. A key innovation of this research is the integration of risk analysis and cost-benefit analysis with data uncertainties. This will be accomplished by introducing three risk components—hazard intensity, exposure, and vulnerability—that can be used to evaluate roadway performance and to monetize the potential benefits and costs of access management projects. These components are then presented in a three-dimensional diagram to facilitate tradeoff analysis and to allow for risk-cost-benefit analysis with data uncertainties and tradeoff analysis to complement one another. The developed framework is demonstrated by applying it to four major U.S. highways with a combined length of 321.95 km.