Research Papers (2009 – 2013)

Abstract

Recent research has advocated the development of a wide range of road safety performance indicators. Of particular importance was the need to develop city-wide speed performance indicators. This importance stems from the fact that such indicators could be used to monitor the road network performance, inform speed enforcement policies, evaluate the effects of anti speeding measures, and provide a global view of driver behaviour related to speeds. In this paper, a methodology to develop city-wide speed indicators for the City of Edmonton is proposed. The time mean speed, the standard deviation of the speed and the percentage of vehicles traveling over the speed limit are chosen as the three major indicators to evaluate the speed performance in the City of Edmonton. In total, 581 sites were selected to conduct the speed survey and 25660 hourly speed data were gathered from 2009 to 2011. Speed performance indicators were calculated by aggregating speed data with respect to road types, speed limit, time of the day and day of the week. Analyses were conducted to identify the trends and patterns in each indicator as well as the inter-relationships between different indicators. It was found that the overall mean speed was decreasing gradually; night-time indicators were higher than day-time ones and there existed a clear linear relationship between the mean speed and the non-compliance percentage.

Ran Li, Karim El-Basyouny, Shewkar E. Ibrahim