Urban Roadside Safety

Abstract

Roadside safety in rural environments has been the focus of considerable study, but direct application of this knowledge to the constrained urban environment has posed many challenges. Restricted right-of-way with a greater demand for functional use of the space adjacent to urban roads makes the maintenance of a wide clear zone impractical. This paper summarizes a corridor roadside crash analysis used to help identify urban roadside safety issues and illuminate possible solutions for attempting to mitigate objects in the roadside that have the potential to increase injury severity if hit. The paper focuses on arterial and collector-type facilities in urban areas with speed limits between 25 and 50 mph. The authors assessed corridors of urban roadside conditions and compared 6 years of historic crash data with roadside features. The goal of this effort was to identify potential configurations that posed a greater risk by the use of cluster-crash analysis. Locations with similar features without these companion crashes provided insight into prospective alternative treatments for roadside safety in urban environments. The higher-risk roadside locations identified by these approaches were referred to as urban control zones. The most commonly observed roadside crashes included locations in close lateral proximity to the curb face or lane edge, lane merge locations, select auxiliary lane treatments, sidewalk buffer configurations with rigid objects in close proximity to the travelway, driveway and intersection locations, high-cluster-crash locations, and other common roadside crash conditions.