Network-level Safety Metrics for Overall Traffic Safety Assessment: A Case Study

TL;DR

This paper introduces network-level safety metrics derived from roadside camera videos to evaluate overall traffic safety, showing significant correlation with crash rates and offering a holistic view of traffic safety management.

Contribution

It proposes a novel set of network-level safety metrics based on traffic video analysis, bridging crash reports and traffic flow dynamics for comprehensive safety assessment.

Findings

NSMs significantly correlate with crash rates

All vehicles contribute to safety metrics, not just crash-involved ones

Traffic flow considered as a complex dynamic system

Abstract

Driving safety analysis has recently experienced unprecedented improvements thanks to technological advances in precise positioning sensors, artificial intelligence (AI)-based safety features, autonomous driving systems, connected vehicles, high-throughput computing, and edge computing servers. Particularly, deep learning (DL) methods empowered volume video processing to extract safety-related features from massive videos captured by roadside units (RSU). Safety metrics are commonly used measures to investigate crashes and near-conflict events. However, these metrics provide limited insight into the overall network-level traffic management. On the other hand, some safety assessment efforts are devoted to processing crash reports and identifying spatial and temporal patterns of crashes that correlate with road geometry, traffic volume, and weather conditions. This approach relies merely on crash reports and ignores the rich information of traffic videos that can help identify the role of safety violations in crashes. To bridge these two perspectives, we define a new set of network-level safety metrics (NSM) to assess the overall safety profile of traffic flow by processing imagery taken by RSU cameras. Our analysis suggests that NSMs show significant statistical associations with crash rates. This approach is different than simply generalizing the results of individual crash analyses, since all vehicles contribute to calculating NSMs, not only the ones involved in crash incidents. This perspective considers the traffic flow as a complex dynamic system where actions of some nodes can propagate through the network and influence the crash risk for other nodes. We also provide a comprehensive review of surrogate safety metrics (SSM) in the Appendix A.