Author(s)

S. RAICU, D. COSTESCU & S. BURCIU

Abstract

The impact of risk associated with traffic is rarely included in the evaluation of projects for increasing urban traffic fluency, although the social costs of traffic crashes are estimated as very high. Lately, more frequently, the risk associated with urban road traffic is included, as a supplementary criterion, in the selection of the best urban planning scenarios, in order to a-priory minimize the number of crashes. Therefore, we aim to develop tools to enable the analysis of different intrinsic factors (characteristics of urban area and of road network) on traffic safety performances. The paper presents an analysis of the traffic crashes registered in Bucharest in the period 2008–2014. Following the analysis, the highest values of the average number of crashes were identified for signalized intersections that include tram infrastructure. Hence, the study is continued for this category of network features for which a model to estimate traffic crashes is proposed.

Keywords

crash analysis, crash prediction function, GIS modelling, road safety, spatial analysis.