United States Department of Transportation
i
Improving Crash Predictions – A More Relevant Exposure Measure than AADT for Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Safety Models
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2018-10-01
[PDF-3.62 MB]
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Edition:Final Report (October 2016-June 2018)
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Abstract:Safety at the junction of highways and rails has been a concern for a long time and highway-rail grade crossing (HRGC) safety models have been around since 1940s. One of the main inputs to these models is the annual average daily traffic (AADT). It is an estimate of vehicular use of roadways and serves as a measure of exposure of motor vehicles to crashes with trains in HRGC safety models. This project considered a conceptually more relevant measure of vehicular exposure to train-involved crashes at HRGCs—the portion of AADT that actually encounters trains at HRGCs, termed as (AADT)TP in this research. This is a more reasonable and better exposure measure because the probability of having train-involved crashes arises only in the presence of trains at HRGCs. However, obtaining (AADT)TP for a large number of HRGCs is difficult in practice. This report presents a simulation-based method to estimate (AADT)TP for a study location including validation of the results with field-observed data. A comparison between the use of AADT and (AADT)TP in several HRGC safety models showed the possibility of reaching different conclusions; arguments for preferring results obtained by using the conceptually more relevant (AADT)TP are given. This report also presents a classification method to classify HRGCs into groups for estimation of (AADT)TP.
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