title: Development of a Comprehensive Database System for Safety Analyst.
abstract: This study addressed barriers associated with the use of Safety Analyst, a state-of-the-art tool that has been developed to assist during the entire Traffic Safety Management process but that is not widely used due to a number of challenges as described in this paper. As part of this study, a comprehensive database system and tools to provide data to multiple traffic safety applications, with a focus on Safety Analyst, were developed. A number of data management tools were developed to extract, collect, transform, integrate, and load the data. The system includes consistency-checking capabilities to ensure the adequate insertion and update of data into the database. This system focused on data from roadways, ramps, intersections, and traffic characteristics for Safety Analyst. To test the proposed system and tools, data from Clark County, which is the largest county in Nevada and includes the cities of Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, and North Las Vegas, was used. The database and Safety Analyst together help identify the sites with the potential for safety improvements. Specifically, this study examined the results from two case studies. The first case study, which identified sites having a potential for safety improvements with respect to fatal and all injury crashes, included all roadway elements and used default and calibrated Safety Performance Functions (SPFs). The second case study identified sites having a potential for safety improvements with respect to fatal and all injury crashes, specifically regarding intersections; it used default and calibrated SPFs as well. Conclusions were developed for the calibration of safety performance functions and the classification of site subtypes. Guidelines were provided about the selection of a particular network screening type or performance measure for network screening.
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Transportation Research Center, 4505 Maryland Parkway, P.O. Box 454015, Las Vegas, NV 89154-4015, USA.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Paz
authors.affiliation: Transportation Research Center, College of Engineering, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway, P.O. Box 454015, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA.
authors.forename: Naveen
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Veeramisti
authors.affiliation: Transportation Research Center, College of Engineering, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway, P.O. Box 454015, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA.
authors.forename: Indira
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Khanal
authors.affiliation: Transportation Research Center, College of Engineering, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway, P.O. Box 454015, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA.
authors.forename: Justin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Baker
authors.affiliation: Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas, Escuela de Comercio, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Avenida Brasil 2830, 2340031 Valparaíso, Chile.
authors.forename: Hanns
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: de la Fuente-Mella