Safety effects of road pavement resurfacing: A case study of city-wide scale projects in China

Abstract

This study explores the influence of resurfacing projects on traffic safety. A case study of city-wide road resurfacing projects conducted from July 2014 to February 2015 in China was adopted to carry out the analysis. The crash data of two years before and after the treatment were collected. Firstly, the safety performance function, generalized linear regression, and Gaussian Process centered on Poisson regression were applied to predict the expected number of crashes in the after period if the resurfacing was not applied. Then, the observational before-after study was applied to compare the safety performance of the before and after period of resurfacing projects. Finally, crash modification factors for various target accidents in different time durations were calculated to evaluate the influence of the resurfacing projects on traffic safety. The results show that the resurfacing projects along with some minor changes, such as widen shoulders and optimized lane markings have remarkably good effects on reducing both the crashes counts and the level of severity. The degree of good effects of the resurfacing projects on different types of crashes is ranked as follows: road crashes with slight consequences > total crashes > road crashes with severe consequences > intersection crashes.