Citation

El Esawey M, Sayed T. Accid. Anal. Prev. 2012; 49: 419-428.

Affiliation

Department of Civil Engineering, Ain Shams University, 1 El-Sarayat Street, Cairo, Egypt. m.elesawey@eng.asu.edu.eg

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.aap.2012.03.008

PMID

23036421

Abstract

Roadside safety has been a concern for highway engineers and designers for many decades. A significant part of this concern is related to collisions with utility poles. Current practices and standards for placing utility poles are based on a combination of qualitative guidelines/heuristics and relatively outdated findings. Accordingly, there is a need to study the safety level associated with placing utility poles at different lateral offsets from the edge of the travel-way. In this paper a Safety Performance Function (SPF) is developed to relate roadway and roadside variables to utility pole collision frequency. It was found that increasing the poles offset has a more significant effect on reducing the frequency of utility pole collisions compared to increasing poles spacing. Based on the developed utility pole-SPF, design charts were provided to facilitate calculations and decision-making process. The developed utility pole-SPF was compared to a widely-used utility pole collisions model and the differences in the type of data and the development methodology were highlighted.

Language: en