Developing highway geometric design guidelines for the 21st century

公路工程师早就认识到，公路系统由三个主要组成部分组成：道路使用者、车辆和道路本身，包括周围环境和环境条件。公路系统的正确设计不仅需要了解这三个组成部分，还需要了解这些组成部分如何相互作用。然而，公路设计实践是基于大多数五十多年前制定的指导方针。这些指导方针很少注意公路系统三个组成部分之间的相互作用。因此，公路设计实践在很大程度上未能跟上车辆设计和道路使用者行为的演变。虽然包括加拿大在内的不同国家的设计准则已作了许多改进，但世界各地的公路从业人员一致认为，仍需作出更多改进。在过去五年里，申请人提出了一个全面和多学科的安全框架方法，以改善公路安全，减少碰撞频率和严重程度。在这项提案中，申请人正在过去几年的工作和研究结果的基础上，将这些研究结果以及其他研究人员的工作转化为可以随时实施的设计准则。因此，本研究建议的目的是通过制定明确的公路几何设计准则，说明公路系统各组成部分之间的相互作用，以帮助提高公路的安全性能。实现这一目标应有助于公路从业人员设计和建造符合驾驶员行为和期望的更好、更安全的道路。这反过来又会减少公路建设成本，因为在施工后发现安全问题时，最大限度地减少重新设计和重新建设道路的需要。更重要的是，这项研究将为减少高速公路碰撞的努力做出重大贡献，从而减少相关的经济成本和社会痛苦。

Highway engineers have long recognized that the highway system consists of three main components: the road user, the vehicle, and the road itself including the surrounding environment and environmental conditions. A proper design of the highway system requires not only understanding these three components but also understanding how these components interact together. Yet, highway design practices are based on guidelines that were mostly developed over fifty years ago. These guidelines paid little attention to the interaction among the three components of the highway system. As a result, highway design practices have in large part failed to keep up with the evolution of vehicle design and behaviour of road users. Although many improvements have been introduced in the design guidelines of the different countries, including Canada, highway practitioners worldwide agree that more is still needed.Over the past five years, the applicant has introduced a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary safety framework approach to improve highway safety and reduce both collision frequency and severity. In this proposal, the applicant is building on the work and findings during the past few years to translate these research findings, as well as work by other researchers, into design guidelines that can be readily implemented. It is therefore the objective of this research proposal to help improve highway safety performance through developing safety-explicit highway geometric design guidelines that account for the interaction among the components of the highway system. Achieving this objective should help highway practitioners design and build better and safer roads conforming to driver behaviour and expectations. This would in turn reduce highway construction costs through minimizing the need to re-design and re-construct roads in cases here safety concerns are discovered after construction. More importantly, this research would be a major contribution in the efforts to reduce highway collisions, thus reducing the associated economic costs and social pain and suffering.