Influence of Multiple Freeway Design Features on Freight Traffic Safety

Abstract

Since various freeway design features are simultaneously installed on roadways, it is important to assess their combined safety effects correctly. This study investigated associations between multiple roadway cross-section design features on freeways and traffic safety. In order to consider the interaction impact of multiple design features and nonlinearity of predictors concurrently, multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) models were developed for all types and freight vehicle crashes. In MARS models, a series of basis functions is applied to represent the space of predictors and the combined safety effectiveness of multiple design features can be interpreted by the interaction terms. The generalized linear regression models (GLMs) with negative binomial (NB) distribution were also evaluated for comparison purposes. The results determine that the MARS models show better model fitness than the NB models due to its strength to reflect the nonlinearity of crash predictors and interaction impacts among variables under different ranges. Various interaction impacts among parameters under different ranges based on knot values were found from the MARS models, whereas two interaction terms were found in the NB models. The results also showed that the combined safety effects of multiple treatments from the NB models over-estimated the real combined safety effects when using the simple multiplication approach suggested by the HSM (Highway Safety Manual). Therefore, it can be recommended that the MARS is applied to evaluate the safety impacts of multiple treatments to consider both the interaction impacts among treatments and nonlinearity issues simultaneously.