Abstract

Safety issues at school zone areas have been one of the most important topics in the traffic safety field. Although many studies have evaluated the effectiveness of various traffic control devices (e.g., sign, flashing beacon, speed monitoring display), there is a lack of studies exploring different roadway countermeasures and the relationship between school-related factors and crashes. In this study, the most crash-prone school zone was identified in Orange and Seminole Counties, Florida, based on crash rate. Afterward, a microsimulation network was built in VISSIM environment to test different roadway countermeasures in the school zones. Three different countermeasures: two-step speed reduction (TSR), decreasing the number of driveways (DD), and replacing the two-way left-turn lane (TWLTL) to the raised median (RM) were implemented in the microsimulation. Three surrogate safety measures-: (1) time exposed time to collision (TET), (2) time integrated time to collision (TIT) and (3) time exposed rear-end crash risk index (TERCRI) were utilized in this study as indicators for safety evaluation. The higher value of surrogate safety measures indicates higher crash risk. The results showed that both TSR and DD reduced TET, TIT and TERCRI values significantly compare to the base condition. Moreover, the combination of TSR and DD countermeasures outperformed their individual effectiveness. The One-way ANOVA analysis showed that all the sub-scenarios were significantly different from each other. Sensitivity analysis result has proved that all the sub-scenarios in TSR and DD reduced TET, TIT and TERCRI values significantly for different value of TTC threshold. On the other hand, for converting the TWLTL to RM, the crash risk was higher than the base condition because of the turning movements of vehicle. The results of this study could help transportation planners and decision makers to understand the effect of these countermeasures to improve safety at school zones.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2019

Semester

Summer

Advisor

Abdel-Aty, Mohamed

Degree

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering

Degree Program

Civil Engineering; Transportation System Engineering

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0007708

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0007708

Language

English

Release Date

August 2019

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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