Some bias in road safety evaluation in Before/After Studies

New traffic management schemes - variable speed control, managed lane operations as Hard Shoulder Running, tidal flow, dedicated bus or taxis lane are nowadays developing. Their impact on traffic safety can be computed by means of Before/After studies. In these studies, the counts of accidents which occurred in the period after and in the period before the implementation of the new scheme are examined. As some contributing factors to accidents might have changed between before and after periods - due to the general safety policy, the betterment of vehicles or of the road, it is important to identify the impact of these changes on the accident number, in order not to confound this impact (called the "time effect") with the one of the new scheme; this time effect is identified on a "reference" site as the difference between the accident risks between the before and the after period on this reference site. There is an implicit assumption that there are no, or no important structural differences between the reference and the assessed sites (in terms of infrastructure, traffic, external conditions). If it is not the case, and if the time effect varies according to the elements of the infrastructure or of the traffic patterns, the "average" time effect computed on the reference site cannot be directly used on the assessed site, due to a bias. This bias is mitigated by splitting the reference site and its traffic into traffic scenarios or into infrastructure scenarios, and by computing the time effect on each element; then those time effects are used, with the appropriate weights, on the assessed site. The impact of this breakdown on the variance of the estimation is provided. A numerical application, for a French managed lane operation, is given to illustrate the interest of the method in road safety assessment.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Source ICTIS 2011, 1st International Conference on Transportation Information and Safety, Multimodal Approach to Sustained Transportation System Development, Information, Technology, Implementation
Author Seidowsky, Régine, Aron, Maurice, Cohen, Simon
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 8, 2026, 06:47 (UTC)
Created May 8, 2026, 06:47 (UTC)
Identifier hal-00903413
Language en
contributor Génie des Réseaux de Transport Terrestres et Informatique Avancée (IFSTTAR/GRETTIA) ; Institut Français des Sciences et Technologies des Transports, de l'Aménagement et des Réseaux (IFSTTAR)
creator Seidowsky, Régine
date 2011-06-30T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 421213f4-a191-4c0c-8173-3d631ee5426c
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2024-12-03T00:00:00
relation info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1061/41177(415)187
set_spec type:COMM