Citation

Ye Z, Wang C, Yu Y, Shi X, Wang W. Traffic Injury Prev. 2016; 17(6): 656-661.

Affiliation

Jiangsu Province Collaborative Innovation Center of Modern Urban Traffic Technologies, Southeast University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/15389588.2015.1133905

PMID

26890306

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Safety performance at bus stops is generally evaluated by using historical traffic crash data or traffic conflict data. However, in China, it is quite difficult to obtain such data mainly due to the lack of traffic data management and organizational issues. In light of this, the primary objective of this study is to develop a quantitative approach to evaluate bus stop safety performance.

METHODS: The concept of level-of-safety for bus stops is introduced and corresponding models are proposed to quantify safety levels, which consider conflict points, traffic factors, geometric characteristics, traffic signs and markings, pavement conditions, and lighting conditions. Principal component analysis and k-means clustering method were used to model and quantify safety levels for bus stops.

RESULTS: A case study was conducted to show the applicability of the proposed model with data collected from 46 samples for the seven most common types of bus stops in China, using 32 of the samples for modeling and 14 samples for illustration. Based on the case study, six levels of safety for bus stops were defined. Finally, a linear regression analysis between safety levels and the number of traffic conflicts showed that they had a strong relationship (R-square value of 0.908).

CONCLUSIONS: The results indicated the method was well validated and could be practically used for the analysis and evaluation of bus stop safety in China. The proposed model was relatively easy to implement without the requirement of traffic crash data and/or traffic conflict data. In addition, with the proposed method, it was feasible to evaluate countermeasures to improve bus stop safety (e.g., exclusive bus lanes).

Language: en