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Safety Decision Support System for Rural Highways

Given Wisconsin’s strong environmental traditions and low population per land area, it is not surprising that the majority Wisconsin land is classified as rural. Rural road crashes consistently account for almost half of the crashes in Wisconsin and 57 percent of 2.9 billion economic loss by crash severity in the state, which has become a pressing issue and a real hurdle for improving overall highway safety. As part of the Wisconsin effort to improve rural highway safety, the research developed a data-driven, solution-based safety improvement decision support system (DSS) for rural roads using a class of computer and GIS techniques. The safety DSS assists making informed decisions through an analytical approach attempting to replicate the problem identification process by safety analysts in the context of rural safety. The crash location problems are overcome by using an intelligent crash mapping tool (C-MAT) with a stepwise approach applied to choose the “sites of opportunity” by highway functional classification, crash frequency and severity at a certain statistical confidence interval. The system implementation analysis shows that 30 sites located either on rural arterials, collectors or local roads and streets were selected out of 9788 sites in total. The moderate number of locations identified enables WisDOT to conduct an in-depth safety review to address the crash causes and appropriate countermeasures. In summary, the DSS provides an efficient, streamlined, tangible, and data-driven solution to the rural highway safety problem.