Vehicle crashes on rural roadways in Kansas continue to be a serious safety concern. Many state agencies are utilizing systemic safety tools to identify, prioritize, and implement countermeasures based on numerous data sources. The United States Road Assessment Program (usRAP) is one such systemic tool which relies on determining areas of risk along a roadway without the need of localized crash data, which can sometimes be hard to obtain depending on the roadway. Three rural two-lane corridors were selected, including a US highway, Kansas highway, and a rural secondary road. Data collection for the usRAP software included manual speed data collection, system-wide centerline miles and crashes, crash costs, countermeasure costs, and manual roadway coding data every 100 m. The usRAP software evaluated each corridor and developed a star rating for each 100-m segment indicating areas of potential risk to vehicles, motorcycles, pedestrians, and bicyclists. Safer Roads Investment Plans were developed for each corridor based on the coded information. These plans included recommended countermeasures which mainly targeted run-offroad crashes, such as removing fixed objects in the clear zone, enhancing horizontal curves through delineation, and side slope improvements. Additionally, a benefit-cost ratio was provided for each countermeasure and also a program benefit-cost ratio. Output from usRAP for the rural secondary corridor was compared to a road safety audit (RSA) which was recently completed and the results were similar for issues that could be identified from the roadway point of view.
Demonstration and Implementation Recommendations to Integrate the United States Road Assessment Program into Existing Kansas Highway Safety Programs. Technical Summary
2016
2 pages
Report
No indication
English
Transportation Safety , Road Transportation , Transportation & Traffic Planning , Computer Software , Highway Engineering , Highway safety programs , Road assessments , Systemic safety tool , Countermeasures , Data collection , Software application , Rural roadways , Highway corridor surveys , Benefit cost ratio , Road Safety Audit (RSA) , United State Road Assessment Program (usRAP) , Kansas