title: Evaluating safety risk of locating above ground utility structures in the highway right-of-way.
abstract: Roadside safety has been a concern for highway engineers and designers for many decades. A significant part of this concern is related to collisions with utility poles. Current practices and standards for placing utility poles are based on a combination of qualitative guidelines/heuristics and relatively outdated findings. Accordingly, there is a need to study the safety level associated with placing utility poles at different lateral offsets from the edge of the travel-way. In this paper a Safety Performance Function (SPF) is developed to relate roadway and roadside variables to utility pole collision frequency. It was found that increasing the poles offset has a more significant effect on reducing the frequency of utility pole collisions compared to increasing poles spacing. Based on the developed utility pole-SPF, design charts were provided to facilitate calculations and decision-making process. The developed utility pole-SPF was compared to a widely-used utility pole collisions model and the differences in the type of data and the development methodology were highlighted.
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil Engineering, Ain Shams University, 1 El-Sarayat Street, Cairo, Egypt. m.elesawey@eng.asu.edu.eg
authors.forename: Mohamed
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: El Esawey
authors.forename: Tarek
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sayed
mesh_terms: D000056:Accident Prevention / Q000379:methods*; D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D001955:British Columbia; D004779:Environment Design; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012449:Safety