Investigating the Effects of Pavement Roughness on Freeway Safety using Data from Five States

• Published in: Transportation research record Vol. 2674; no. 2; pp. 127 - 134
• Main Authors: Lee, Jaeyoung, Abdel-Aty, Mohamed, Nyame-Baafi, Eric
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.02.2020
• ISSN: 0361-1981; 2169-4052
• DOI: 10.1177/0361198120905834

Traffic crashes occur usually because of a combination of human, roadway/environment, and vehicle factors. Pavement condition is closely related to these three factors as it is one of the most important roadway/environment factors and it affects driving behavior and vehicle performance at the same time. Previous studies have shown that pavement condition plays an important role in safety. This study develops four different safety performance functions to evaluate the effect of pavement roughness, measured by the International Roughness Index (IRI), on the number of crashes using the interstate highway data from five U.S. states representing different geographical and weather regions: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, and Michigan. The modeling results identify many significant variables including traffic volume and proportion of trucks, through lane count, shoulder type, median width, high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane operation and HOV lane count, speed limit, area type along with IRI-related factors. The results indicate that increased IRI (deterioration of pavement quality) contributes to large numbers of total crashes. On interstate highways with speed limits of 70 mph and higher, the effects of IRI are relatively smaller. On the other hand, the effects of IRI increase with a larger traffic volume. Based on the modeling results, seven crash modification functions of IRI values by crash type and speed limit were estimated. The findings from this study are expected to be useful for both pavement and safety engineers to understand the relationship between IRI and safety on freeways.