Developing a Safety Effectiveness Evaluation Tool for California

Research Team: Jia Li (lead) and Michael Zhang

UC Campus(es): UC Davis

Problem Statement: Crash modification factor (CMF) is an effectiveness measure of safety countermeasures. It is widely used by state agencies to evaluate and prioritize various safety improvement projects. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) CMF Clearinghouse provides CMFs for a broad range of countermeasures, but still, the existing CMFs often cannot meet the needs for characterizing the safety impacts of countermeasures in new scenarios. Developing CMFs, meanwhile, is costly, time-consuming, and requires extensive data collection. A more cost-effective way to provide preliminary CMF estimations is needed.

Project Description: This product developed a low-cost and easily extendable data-driven framework for CMF predictions. This framework performs data mining on existing CMF records in the FHWA CMF Clearinghouse. The project also integrates multiple machine-learning models to learn the complex hidden relationships between different safety countermeasure scenarios. Finally, the proposed framework is trained against the CMF Clearinghouse data and performs comprehensive evaluations. The results show that the proposed framework can provide CMF predictions for new countermeasure scenarios with reasonable accuracy, with overall mean absolute errors less than 0.2.

Status: In Progress

Budget: $80,000