| Traffic safety professionals are confronted with increasing traffic crashes, injuries and fatalities with the continuous growth of traffic on our highways. One of the goals of the traffic safety projects and programs is to reduce traffic crashes, crash potential and severity in order to mitigate area-wide traffic crash problems resulting from driving under the influence of alcohol, safety restraint system non-use and misuse, driver behavioral problems, traffic law violations, and others.; Proper allocation of resources for a statewide safety improvement program is very important considering the ultimate benefit that will be attained from it. In such safety improvement projects and programs, the usual practice of the funding agencies is to allocate funds based on the merit of the proposals submitted by various agencies in the state. The problem is that there is no reference from which a benefit/cost analysis of such projects and programs can be performed.; The present research developed a comprehensive methodology to justify the resource allocation for projects and programs of this nature to be beneficial. As a part of this research, a model to calculate the relative safety performance of an area (county or city/township) was developed.; The Safety Performance Index (SPI) developed in this research considers weighted crash frequencies and crash rates using all exposure factors (population, number of registered vehicles and vehicle miles of travel). The model thus developed will help prioritize the areas (counties or city/townships) for resource allocations. The identified areas were then highlighted on a map utilizing GIS technology. For optimum resource allocation, the SPI as well as the average percent reduction in crashes, based on ‘before’ and ‘during’ crashes, were considered. Optimization of resource allocation was performed using Linear Programming technique. It is recommended that a statistical test of significance followed by an economic analysis should be performed in order to evaluate the projects and programs. |
