• International Journal of Highway Engineering
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.135-146
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• 2013

PURPOSES : This study aimed to analyze the impact the operation of pre-signals at 4-leg signalized intersections and present primary environmental factors of roads that need to be considered in the installation of pre-signals. METHODS : Shift of proportions safety effectiveness evaluation method which assesses shifts in proportions of target collision types to determine safety effectiveness was applied to analyze traffic crash by types. Also, Empirical Bayes before/after safety effectiveness evaluation method was adapted to analyze the impact pre-signal installation. Negative binomial regression was conducted to determine SPF(safety performance function). RESULTS : Pre-signals are effective in reducing the number of head on, right angle and sideswipe collisions and both the total number of personal injury crashes and severe crashes. Also, it is deemed that each factor used as an independent variable for the SPF model has strong correlation with the total number of personal injury crashes and severe crashes, and impacts general traffic crashes as a whole. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests the following should be considered in pre-signal installation on intersections. 1) U-turns allowed in the front and rear 2) A high number of roads that connect to the intersection 3) Many right-turn traffic flows 4) Crosswalks installed in the front and rear 5) Insufficient left-turn lanes compared to left-turn traffic flows or no left-turn-only lane.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.81-89
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• 2015

Crashes that occur at tollgates have different characteristics compared to those of the mainline on expressways in terms of crash cause, crash type, and vehicle type. Due to this fact, the safety performance function (SPF) focused on the expressway tollgates, apart from the mainline, should be developed. The aim of this study is, therefore, to identify the influential factors and develope a SPF for crashes at tollgates. Firstly, we established independent variables affecting crashes at tollgates through literature review and descriptive statistical analysis. Based on these variables, two negative binomial regression models with different form of independent variables were developed and goodness-of-fits of each model were compared. According to the results, the number of crashes increases i) as AADT, Hi-pass rate, and heavy vehicle rate increase, ii) as average lane width decreases, iii) on the mainline tollgate type. The safety performance function developed in this study could be applied to select hot-spots for expressway tollgates.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.34-48
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was two-fold; first, to develop safety performance functions (SPF) using transportation-related big data for all types of roads in Korea were developed, Second, to provide basic information to develop measures for relatively dangerous roads by evaluating the safety grade for various roads based on it. The coordinates of traffic accident data are used to match roads across the country based on the national standard node and link system. As independent variables, this study effort uses link length, the number of traffic volume data from ViewT established by the Korea Transport Research Institute, and the number of dangerous driving behaviors based on the digital tachograph system installed on commercial vehicles. Based on the methodology and result of analysis used in this study, it is expected that the transportation safety improvement projects can be properly selected, and the effects can be clearly monitored and quantified.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.135-144
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• 2009

This study estimates the expected number of accidents in Kyungbuk Province to capitalize on experience gained from four years of accident history using the Empirical Bayes (EB) Method. The number of accidents of each site in Kyungbuk Province is recalculated using the Equivalent Property Damage Only (EPDO) method to reflect the severities of the accidents. A cluster analysis is performed to determine similar sites and a unique Safety Performance Function (SPF) is established for each site. The overdispersion parameter is built to correct the difference between the actual number of accidents and the underlying probability distribution. To adjust for varying traffic characteristics of each site, a relative weight is applied and eventually estimates the expected number of accidents. The results show that the highest accident sites are Kimcheon, Youngcheon, and Chilgok, but on the other hand the lowest is Gunwi.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.35-44
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• 2021

In recent times, several studies have been conducted focusing on crashes occurring on the main segment of the highway. However, there is a dearth of research dealing with traffic safety relating to other highway facilities, especially ramp areas. According to the Korea Expressway Corporation's Expressway Information Service, 6,717 crashes have occurred on ramps in the five years from 2015~2019, which accounts for about 15% of all highway accidents. In this study, the simple and full safety performance functions (SPFs) were evaluated and explored using different statistical distributions (i.e., Poisson Gamma (PG) and Poisson Inverse Gaussian (PIG)) and techniques (i.e., fixed effects (FE) and random effects (RE)) to provide more accurate crash prediction models for highway ramp sections. Data on the geometric characteristics of traffic and roadways were collected from various systems and with extensive efforts using a street-view application. The results showed that the PIG models present more accurate crash predictions in general. The results also indicated that the RE models performed better than FE models for simple and full SPFs. The findings from this study offer transportation practitioners using the Korea Expressway Corporation's Expressway a dependable reference to enhance and understand traffic safety in ramp areas based on accurate crash prediction models and empirical evidence.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.5585-5593
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• 2014

This study tested the hypothesis that the significance of the heterogeneous dispersion parameter in safety performance function (SPF) used to estimate the expected crashes is affected by the endogenous heterogeneous prior distributions, and analyzed the impacts of the mis-specified dispersion parameter on the evaluation results for traffic safety countermeasures. In particular, this study simulated the Poisson means based on the heterogeneous dispersion parameters and estimated the SPFs using both the negative binomial (NB) model and the heterogeneous negative binomial (HNB) model for analyzing the impacts of the model mis-specification on the mean and dispersion functions in SPF. In addition, this study analyzed the characteristics of errors in the crash reduction factors (CRFs) obtained when the two models are used to estimate the posterior means and variances, which are essentially estimated through the estimated hyper-parameters in the heterogeneous prior distributions. The simulation study results showed that a mis-estimation on the heterogeneous dispersion parameters through the NB model does not affect the coefficient of the mean functions, but the variances of the prior distribution are seriously mis-estimated when the NB model is used to develop SPFs without considering the heterogeneity in dispersion. Consequently, when the NB model is used erroneously to estimate the prior distributions with heterogeneous dispersion parameters, the mis-estimated posterior mean can produce large errors in CRFs up to 120%.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.203-213
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• 2021

A vehicle crash occurs due to various factors such as the geometry of the road section, traffic, and driver characteristics. A safety performance function has been used in many studies to estimate the relationship between vehicle crash and road factors statistically. And depends on the purpose of the analysis, various characteristic variables have been used. And various characteristic variables have been used in the studies depending on the purpose of analysis. The existing domestic studies generally reflect the average characteristics of the sections by quantifying the traffic volume in macro aggregate units such as the ADT, but this has a limitation that it cannot reflect the real-time changing traffic characteristics. Therefore, the need for research on effective aggregation units that can flexibly reflect the characteristics of the traffic environment arises. In this paper, we develop a safety performance function that can reflect the traffic characteristics in detail with an aggregate unit for one hour in addition to the daily model used in the previous studies. As part of the present study, we also perform a comparison and evaluation between models. The safety performance function for daily and hourly units is developed using a negative binomial regression model with the number of accidents as a dependent variable. In addition, the optimal negative binomial regression model for each of the hourly and daily models was selected, and their prediction performances were compared. The model and evaluation results presented in this paper can be used to determine the risk factors for accidents in the highway section considering the dynamic characteristics. In addition, the model and evaluation results can also be used as the basis for evaluating the availability and transferability of the hourly model.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.93-102
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• 2012

The frequency and severity of traffic accidents related to signalized intersections in urban areas have been more serious than those in both arterial segments and crosswalks. Especially, traffic accidents involved with injuries and fatalities have caused by traffic signal violations within intersections. Therefore, many countries including Korea have installed the red light enforcement camera (RLE) to reduce traffic accidents associated with the traffic signal violation. Meanwhile, many methodologies have been studied in terms of safety impacts estimation of red light enforcement, which, however, cannot be easy to conduct. In this study, safety impacts was estimated for intersections of Chicago downtown area using SPF models and EB approach. As a result, for all crash types and target traffic accident types such as "angle", "rear end", "sideswipe in the same and other directions", "turn", and "head on", fatal crashes were reduced by 26% and 38%. However, RLE may increase property-demage-only-crashes by 3.23% and 1.16%, respectively.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.583-595
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• 2014

Currently, Korean transportation policies are aiming for increase of safety and environment-friendly and efficient operation, by avoiding construction and expansion of roads, and upgrading road alignments and facilities. This is revealed by that there have been 22 road expansion projects (30%) and 50 road improvement projects (70%) under the 3rd Five-Year Plan for National Highways ('11~'15), while there were 53 road expansion projects (71%) and 22 road improvement projects (29%) under the 2nd Five-Year Plan for National Highways. For more effective road improvement projects, there is a need of choosing projects after an objective and scientific safety assessment of each road, and assessing safety improvement depending on projects. This study is intended to develop a model for this road safety analysis and assessment. The major objective of this study is creating a road safety analysis and assessment model appropriate for Korean society, based on the HSM (Highway Safety Manual) of the U.S. In order to build up data for model development, the sections thought to have identical geometrical structure factors in 5 lines, Cheonbuk province, were divided as homogeneous sections, and representative values of geometric structures, facilities, traffic volume, climate conditions and land usage were collected from the 1,452 sections divided. In order to build up data for model development, the sections thought to have identical geometrical structure factors in 5 lines, Cheonbuk province, were divided as homogeneous sections, and representative values of geometric structures, facilities, traffic volume, climate conditions and land usage were collected from the 1,452 sections divided. The collected data was processed correlation analysis of each road element was implemented to see which factor had a big effect on traffic accidents. On the basis of these results, then, an accident model was established as a negative binomial regression model.Using the developed model, an Crash Modification Factor (CMF) which determines accident frequency changes depending on safety performance function (SPF) predicting the number of accident occurrence through traffic volume and road section expansion, road geometric structure and traffic properties, was extracted.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.423-433
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• 2017

During recent 5 years, it was recorded that 20% of total accident frequency and 30% of total number of death have been occurred due to drowsy driving. Drowsy driving accident is result from the loss of driving ability due to driver's accumulated fatigue. Continuous driving time can be measured as a surrogate variable to quantify the level of fatigue. The main purpose of this research is to investigate statistical correlation between the proportion of continuous driving vehicle (more than 2 hours) and the number of drowsy accidents. To carry this out, continuous driving time was measured using GPS route-guidance trajectory data. Also, accident frequency, traffic volume and segment length were collected to estimate safety performance function (SPF) for Jungbunearuk expressway in Korea. Through various types of estimated SPFs, statistical correlation was analyzed based on estimated statistical indices. This research can provide theoretical background for enforcement to regulate commercial vehicle driver's continuous driving time. In addition, throughout the trajectory data expansion, it is expected that strategy for anti-drowsy driving facilities installation can be established based on the suggested methodology.