title: Evaluation of a simulation-based surrogate safety metric.
abstract: The development of surrogate safety measures is essential due to the problems of availability and quality of historical crash data. The Aggregate Conflict Propensity Metric (ACPM) is a surrogate metric recently proposed and it is based on conflict studies and traffic simulations. ACPM is expected to be capable of assessing the relative safety levels of traffic facilities and/or treatments in order to help traffic engineers to select appropriate treatments based on traffic safety estimates. This paper presents three experimental tests conducted to evaluate the reliability of ACPM. In each test, ACPM is compared to a traditional conflict indicator in terms of identifying and ranking safety of traffic conditions under various traffic volumes based on traffic simulations. ACPM shows its strength and reliability in all three tests, as it provides results highly consistent with the Highway Safety Manual. The experimental tests indicate that ACPM is a promising surrogate safety measure that can appropriately identify relative safety among traffic treatments and/or facilities and provide traffic engineers with useful information on potential safety impact.
authors.affiliation: Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Naval, Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 DongChuan Road, Shanghai 200240, China. Electronic address: wkobec@hotmail.com.
authors.forename: Chen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Civil Engineering Department, University of Kentucky, 265 Raymond Building, Lexington, KY 40506, USA. Electronic address: nstamat@engr.uky.edu.
authors.forename: Nikiforos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Stamatiadis
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic; D001334:Automobile Driving; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004779:Environment Design; D006801:Humans; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012449:Safety
keywords: Aggregate conflict propensity metric; Conflict studies; Surrogate safety measure; Traffic simulation