Incorporating safety performance measure into urban regional transportation planning

This paper proposes an approach to evaluating safety performance of different future transportation scenarios of the Urban Regional Transportation Plan. The safety consequences of alternative transportation scenarios are considered explicitly in the regional transportation planning process. Three methods that can potentially be used for developing the safety performance measure are compared with the field data. Our result shows that in the absence of sufficient data, the simplest possible method performs equally well compared with the more sophisticated methods. With more data available, the Empirical Bayesian (EB) method appears to outperform other methods. In the paper, safety conditions of each facility type were also evaluated with the same data set, and incorporated into the planning of alternative transportation scenarios based on the safety performance measure.