The evaluation of road safety performances in urban areas

The state of road accidents in Romania, especially in urban areas, underlines the need for research on identifying the appropriate measures for road safety enhancement. In this paper the authors present the results of research on road safety, specific to urban areas and to Bucharest City. The first part of the paper describes the structure of the model developed for evaluation of road safety performances in urban areas for different traffic intensity patterns. The initial level of modeling includes procedures for the representation of the macroscopic urban road network, starting from the representation of the digital urban area, with junctions and street sections classified according to their capacity and functionality. The second level of the model contains functions for estimating the safety performance of the urban transport network. Each category of elements with low safety performance is analyzed, taking into account the physical network characteristics, the traffic flow intensity and accidents statistics. The second part of the paper presents the definition and calibration of the safety performance function for sections of the urban road network from Bucharest. The set of defined safety performance functions will be a useful tool for identifying the possible solutions and measures for safety enhancement.