Topic analysis of Road safety inspections using latent dirichlet allocation: A case study of roadside safety in Irish main roads.

Under the Safe System framework, Road Authorities have a responsibility to deliver inherently safe roads and streets. Addressing this problem depends on knowledge of the road network safety conditions and the number of funds available for new road safety interventions. It also requires the prioritisation of the various interventions that may generate benefits, increasing safety, while ensuring that reasonable steps are taken to remedy the deficiencies detected within a reasonable timeframe.

Detecting unforgiving roadside contributors through the severity analysis of ran-off-road crashes.

The objective of this paper is to study the contributors influencing ran-off-road (ROR) crash severities in a setting that has not been analysed in the literature, namely on freeways not designed according to the "forgiving roadside" concept. To accomplish the analysis, ROR crash data were collected on freeway road sections in Portugal and multinomial and mixed logit models were estimated using the driver injury and the most severely injured occupant as outcome variables. Our results are in line with previous findings reported in the literature on ROR crash severity in a number of distinct settings.

Investigating the relationship between run-off-the-road crash frequency and traffic flow through different functional forms.

Crash prediction models play a major role in highway safety analysis. These models can be used for various purposes, such as predicting the number of road crashes or establishing relationships between these crashes and different covariates. However, the appropriate choice for the functional form of these models is generally not discussed in research literature on road safety.

Safety effects of low-cost engineering measures. An observational study in a Portuguese multilane road.

Single carriageway multilane roads are not, in general, a very safe type of road, mainly because of the high number of seriously injured victims in head-on collisions, when compared with dual carriageway multilane roads, with a median barrier. In this paper the results of a study on the effect of the application of several low cost engineering measures, aimed at road infrastructure correction and road safety improvement on a multilane road (EN6), are presented. The study was developed by the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering (LNEC) for the Portuguese Road Administration and involved a comparison of selected aspects of motorized traffic behaviour (traffic volumes and speeds) measured in several sections of EN6, as well as monitoring of road safety developments in the same road.

The use of international data on fuel sales and vehicle fleet for the estimation of yearly national traffic volumes.

International comparisons are frequently used to assess the road safety performance of a country or to monitor its development over time, at a national or regional level. In most instances either accident or injury risks have to be considered, which results in the need for a quantitative estimation of the amount of travel, namely traffic volumes. Only in special cases may risks be indirectly compared using methods of induced exposure.