Developing highway geometric design guidelines for the 21st century

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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.