RuralSpeedSafetyX: Interactive decision support tool to improve safety

The research on relationships among vehicle operating speed, roadway design elements, weather, and traffic volume on crash outcomes will greatly benefit the road safety profession in general. If these associationships are well understood and characterized, existing techniques and countermeasures for reducing crash frequencies and injuries could potentially improve, and the opportunity for new methodologies addressing and anticipating crash occurrence would naturally ensue. The software developed in this study examines the prevailing operating speeds on a large scale and determines how vehicle operating speeds and different speed measures interact with roadway characteristics and weather condition to influence the likelihood of crashes. The developed interactive decision support tool, named as RuralSpeedSafetyX, incorporates Washington and Ohio data containing the expected total crashes from the final models to show segment -level annual crash analysis. The tool is transferable, and it has adaptability options for newer data sets. (c) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).