• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.32 no.6D
• /
• pp.549-556
• /
• 2012

Longitudinal tunnels are defined as tunnels with length of over 1km. Because of Korea's topographical conditions and as safety measures for linear design, many tunnels are inevitably being constructed in Korea. The number of longitudinal tunnels constructed on expressways amounted to 104 as of the end of 2010 with a total length of 192km. Given the increasing demand for tunnels and the increasing length of tunnels, a safety evaluation of longitudinal tunnels needs to be conducted. As such, this study selected design elements, transportation environment and delineation system as elements to check and tried to determine factors influencing road crashes. For this, tunnels have been classified based on history of crashes; ones with crashes and ones without crashes and statistically meaningful explanatory variables were selected. By using these variables, a logit model was development in order to better grasp the factors that directly and strongly influence crashes. The result, related to crashes as well as the analysis were utility tunnel interior materials of driving lane and passing lane, which are related to driver's visibility, lateral width widening to consolidate space in a tunnel, and annual average daily traffic (AADT) per lane. These results may be used in the future as analysis indicators when drawing up plans to prevent crashes in longitudinal tunnels.