Ranking Pattern of Safety in Rural Road using a Combination of Accident Severity Index and Safety Audit

Road crashes are one of main death causes in Iran. Therefore, studying accident records and roads’ safety problems are of significant importance. Human, environment and vehicles are three principal factors that may affect each crash individually or with others. The road factor is solvable by identifying and eliminating road troubles on time. The main goal in road safety audit is to solve environment and road problems. The detected points do not contribute to accidents and casualties equally. Thus, the points; risk level should be ranked in order to efficiently provide suggestions. A step-by-step method is introduced for road sections’ safety prioritization using 6 parameters of number of accidents, road side conditions, traffic signs, road markings, pavement status, and access point density. It’s the first time that five safety audit and accident factors are used in such models. Steps include field inspection, crash statistics analysis, expert interview, entropy, and TOPSIS. The case study is chosen as Sanandaj-Kamyaran road (Primary two-lane road) in Kordestan province due to its high traffic, importance and high number of accidents. The results reveal that the segments which are rich in accidental history and, also, suffer from important safety audit factors such as high intersection density and poor pavement quality, are of the highest risk.