Advancing the science of road safety management through innovation in crash and non-crash based analysis

根据加拿大汽车运输管理委员会（CCMTA）的数据，加拿大每年有近2000人在使用道路时死亡，16.5万人受伤（其中1万人伤势严重），给社会造成370亿美元的损失。道路交通管理局网站载有可供用户查阅的道路安全措施清单，道路安全利益相关者可采用或调整这些措施，以应对他们的具体道路安全挑战。虽然其中一些已被“证明”是有效的，但人们注意到，对于另一些，还没有可衡量的有效性，因此只认为这些是“有希望的”。为了将那些有希望的措施，特别是与基础设施相关的措施重新分类为“经过验证的”，并在此过程中开发碰撞修改因素，这些因素对于在成本效益分析中估计安全效益和在规划基础设施安全措施时确定项目优先级至关重要。在满足这一需要时，传统的道路安全分析方法所能取得的成果是有限的，尽管缺乏知识，但这一领域的研究成果正在迅速减少。***为了推动科学解决这一空白，我提出了一项五年研究计划，其长期目标是填补道路基础设施决策对安全影响方面难以捉摸的知识空白。其中一些知识差距可能会在未来发生，因为道路上的交通流量越来越多地受到各种水平和混合自动化的影响，而现在看来，这在不久的将来是不可避免的。五年计划将有三个相互关联的组成部分，构成短期目标。第一部分将继续我现有的研究，即开发碰撞修改功能，将工程决策的安全影响与使用碰撞和道路数据的应用环境联系起来。这种知识不仅可以更精确地估计在规划干预措施时作出道路基础设施决策的安全影响，而且还可以促进所得知识的可转移性。第二部分将利用最近在美国和加拿大获得的广泛的自然驾驶数据来调查使用碰撞替代品的可行性，以获得有关道路设计特征的安全影响的知识。第三个部分旨在量化手动和自动混合车辆道路的安全性能，认识到完全自动化和完全渗透可能在遥远的未来。拟议的研究不仅将通过推进安全分析的科学而使道路安全研究界受益，而且还将有助于实现CCMTA最近制定的加拿大道路安全战略（RSS） 2025的目标，帮助实现该战略的目标，使加拿大的道路成为世界上最安全的道路。

According to the Canadian Council of Motor Transportation Administrators (CCMTA), each year in Canada, almost 2,000 people are killed and 165,000 are injured (10,000 seriously) while using Canada's roads, costing society $37 billion. The CCMTA website maintains a user searchable inventory of road safety initiatives which road safety stakeholders can adopt or adapt to address their specific road safety challenges. Although some of these have been “proven” effective, it is noted that for others, measured effectiveness is not yet available, and these are thus considered only as “promising”. There is a need for knowledge on measured safety effectiveness in order to reclassify those promising measures, particularly infrastructure related ones, to “proven”, and in the process to develop crash modification factors that are vital for estimating safety benefits in cost-benefit analysis and project prioritization in planning infrastructure safety measures. In fulfilling this need, there are limits to what can be achieved with traditional road safety analytical methods, and research returns in this area are rapidly diminishing despite the dearth of knowledge. *** To advance the science in addressing this void, I propose a five-year research plan with a long-term goal of filling elusive knowledge gaps on the safety implications of road infrastructure decisions. Some of these knowledge gaps are likely to occur in the future as traffic flow on roads is increasingly impacted by the various levels and mixtures of automation that now seem inevitable in the not so distant future. The five-year program will have three inter-related components that form the short-term objectives. The first component will continue my existing research on developing crash modification functions that relate the safety impacts of an engineering decision to application circumstances using crash and roadway data. This knowledge will not only allow more precise estimation of safety effects in making road infrastructure decisions in planning interventions, but will also facilitate the transferability of the derived knowledge. The second component will utilize the extensive naturalistic driving data recently acquired in the United States and Canada to investigate the viability of using crash surrogates to derive knowledge on safety effects of road design characteristics. The third component aims to quantify the safety performance of roads with mixes of manual and automated vehicles, recognizing that full automation and full penetration may be in the distant future. The proposed research will not only benefit the road safety research community through advancing the science in safety analysis, but it will also contribute towards fulfilling the objectives of the Canada's Road Safety Strategy (RSS) 2025 recently developed by the CCMTA in helping to achieve the Strategy's goal of making Canada's roads the safest in the world.