Driving on horizontal curves is a more complicated task than on straight sections of a roadway, and poses more workload on drivers as well. While a small portion of roadways are made up of horizontal curve sections, approximately a quarter of all fatal crashes on highways occur at horizontal curve sections. Thus, studying the crashes at horizontal curves and the safety improvement at these sections is one of the most interesting topics in the transportation safety field. Safety improvement of horizontal curve sections of rural transportation networks can effectively and considerably contribute to crash severity and frequency reduction. Low-cost countermeasures to improve traffic safety of horizontal curve sections and their effectiveness were discussed. A Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) crash database of nine years (from 2004 to 2012) was used and counties with high number of crashes were selected. Eleven counties with high number of horizontal curve related crashes were selected, and implemented countermeasures at the selected curves were investigated and discussed. K-5 highway is one of the highways with high number of crashes in which the speed limit of a long distance of the roadway, including the problematic curves, reduced in June 2009 from 55 miles per hour (mph) to 50 mph. The effect of this speed limit reduction on crash occurrences of seven years, including 3.5 years before and 3.5 years after the speed limit reduction, was investigated using a statistical t-test method. In addition, various countermeasures to improve the traffic safety of these horizontal curves were discussed.


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    Title :

    Study to Mitigate Rural High-Speed Horizontal Curve Crashes in Kansas


    Contributors:
    H. Momeni (author) / E. R. Russell (author) / M. J. Rys (author)

    Publication date :

    2015


    Size :

    85 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




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