Micro and Macro Analysis of Railroad Grade Crossing Safety
October 2, 2014
About the Presentation
Analysis of railroad-highway grade crossing crashes is often performed at a macroscopic scale, where models are created to identify general trends in national or regional data. The models are mainly to identify or prioritize high-accident locations using the correlation between crossing characteristics and traffic volumes.
This presentation described a project that applied this macro approach, commonly used by the U.S. and many state DOTs, to data from Illinois. The project also incorporated variables identified in a micro analysis—which examined individual accidents at locations with multiple crashes to identify contributing factors—into the macro approach. The result was a set of new models that improved the prediction of crashes and ranking of high-accident locations.
About the Speaker
Rahim Benekohal is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on traffic flow modeling and simulation, traffic flow theory, intelligent transportation systems, traffic operations, and traffic safety.