TY - JOUR
T1 - Analyzing the influence of median cross-section design on highway safety using vehicle dynamics simulations
AU - Stine, Jason S.
AU - Hamblin, Bridget C.
AU - Brennan, Sean N.
AU - Donnell, Eric T.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to recognize the National Cooperative Highway Research Program as part of this study was funded through the NCHRP 22-21 “Median Cross-Section Design for Rural Divided Highways” study. The remainder of the study was funded through the Thomas D. Larson Pennsylvania Transportation Institute . The authors would also like to thank Dr. Roger P. Bligh at the Texas Transportation Institute for providing several real-world data sets used in the comparison of the simulations discussed in Section 5 .
PY - 2010/11
Y1 - 2010/11
N2 - Although vehicle dynamics simulations have long been used in vehicle design and crash reconstruction, their use for highway design is rare. This paper investigates the safety of highway medians through iterative simulations of off-road median encroachments. The commercially available software CarSim was used to simulate over one hundred thousand encroachments, representing the entire passenger vehicle fleet and a wide range of encroachment angles, departure speeds, steering inputs, and braking inputs. Each individual simulation output was then weighted using data from previous studies to reflect the probability of each specific accident scenario occurring in a real-life median encroachment. Results of this analysis illustrate the relative influence of median cross-section geometry on the resulting accident outcomes. The simulations indicate that the overall safety of a highway median depends on the occurrence of both vehicle rollover and median crossover events, and the cross-section shape, slope, and width are all shown to greatly affect each of these incidents. An evaluation of the simulation results was conducted with vehicle trajectories from previous experimental crash tests. Further assessment of the aggregate simulation results to actual crash data was achieved through comparison with several databases of crash statistics. Both efforts showed a strong agreement between the simulations and the real-life crash data.
AB - Although vehicle dynamics simulations have long been used in vehicle design and crash reconstruction, their use for highway design is rare. This paper investigates the safety of highway medians through iterative simulations of off-road median encroachments. The commercially available software CarSim was used to simulate over one hundred thousand encroachments, representing the entire passenger vehicle fleet and a wide range of encroachment angles, departure speeds, steering inputs, and braking inputs. Each individual simulation output was then weighted using data from previous studies to reflect the probability of each specific accident scenario occurring in a real-life median encroachment. Results of this analysis illustrate the relative influence of median cross-section geometry on the resulting accident outcomes. The simulations indicate that the overall safety of a highway median depends on the occurrence of both vehicle rollover and median crossover events, and the cross-section shape, slope, and width are all shown to greatly affect each of these incidents. An evaluation of the simulation results was conducted with vehicle trajectories from previous experimental crash tests. Further assessment of the aggregate simulation results to actual crash data was achieved through comparison with several databases of crash statistics. Both efforts showed a strong agreement between the simulations and the real-life crash data.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.aap.2010.04.018
DO - 10.1016/j.aap.2010.04.018
M3 - Article
C2 - 20728628
AN - SCOPUS:78049367757
SN - 0001-4575
VL - 42
SP - 1769
EP - 1777
JO - Accident Analysis and Prevention
JF - Accident Analysis and Prevention
IS - 6
ER -