Development of Highway Accident Hazard Index

Abstract

The objective of this study was to develop an accident hazard index (AHI) for use by traffic engineers for an overall look at the highway safety problem within a state, and to identify those counties with serious highway safety problems. In addition, a computer‐aided safety oriented program (CASOP) was developed in order to facilitate the computation process for the AHI values. The average number of fatal and injury accidents over a three‐year period was used as the parameter to construct the AHI. Population, number of registered vehicles, and miles of paved highway were selected as the normalizing factors in the constructed of the AHI values. Based on these data, an AHI was constructed for each of the 46 counties in the state of South Carolina. As a result of this study, it was concluded that the AHI can be used for measuring the relative highway safety of various counties within a state in an effort to find counties with serious accident problems so that proper countermeasures could be developed accordingly.