Influence of Land Use and Driveway Placement on Safety Performance of Arterial Highways

Abstract

Characterizing driveway safety is a relevant and relatively complex topic in transportation safety research. This research studied the safety link of driveways abutting Oregon highways and considered various factors proposed in the current literature for design and evaluation of the safety performance of roadside elements. On the basis of two probability samples from rural and urban arterial state highways, this research developed alternative safety performance functions to evaluate the safety impacts of various driveway configurations. These safety performance functions were intended to explore driveway safety beyond the average driveway density treatment commonly encountered in the literature. The statistical models and methodologies in this research are comparable with those in the Highway Safety Manual. The proposed models exhibited different ranges of effects for urban and rural conditions, but type of land use proved a prominent factor for both the urban and the rural models. The analysis showed that roadside safety is influenced mainly by driveways associated with commercial and industrial land uses in the urban environment. Similarly, industrial driveways are more influential for safety than other types in rural environments. In addition, the rural model uncovered a safety connection to clusters of driveways rather than to driveways alone. This research indicated that after driveway land use in rural environments was accounted for, clustered driveways tended to have fewer crashes compared with isolated driveways.