Education
Intersection safety is a national, state, and local priority. In 2008, approximately 40 percent of crashes that occurred in the United States were intersection-related. However, current methods for assessing intersection safety require either a long history of crash data or subjective observation of traffic conflicts—both of which can be time consuming and expensive. This presentation highlighted a new technique for evaluating intersection safety that overcomes the drawbacks of traditional approaches. The proposed approach uses the massive amount of high-resolution traffic signal event records (including both vehicle-detector actuations and signal phase changes) that has recently become available at a number of MnDOT intersections. The presentation discussed how high-resolution traffic signal data can be used to estimate the number of rear-end and right-angle conflicts and to predict the crash rate at an intersection. The proposed approach could be used to rank the safety performance for intersections within a jurisdiction in a proactive manner, thus helping agencies prioritize the intersections that need improvement.