• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.95-106
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• 2012

Driver's capability of identifying the change in freeway alignments and environments is one of important factors associated with traffic safety on freeways. In particular, driver's visibility and recognition capability are highly dependent on the altitude of the sun by sunset, sunrise, and nighttime. The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of geometric conditions affecting crash occurrences at sunset, sunrise, and nighttime. Poisson and negative binomial regressions were adopted to predict freeway crash frequency in this study. Freeway crash data during 2007~2010 were used for developing the crash frequency models. A set of variables representing the characteristics of geometric conditions were identified as significant ones affecting crash occurrences. The results of this study would be useful in deriving effective countermeasures for preventing traffic crashes that mainly occur at sunset, sunrise, and nighttime on freeways.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.93-102
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• 2012

The frequency and severity of traffic accidents related to signalized intersections in urban areas have been more serious than those in both arterial segments and crosswalks. Especially, traffic accidents involved with injuries and fatalities have caused by traffic signal violations within intersections. Therefore, many countries including Korea have installed the red light enforcement camera (RLE) to reduce traffic accidents associated with the traffic signal violation. Meanwhile, many methodologies have been studied in terms of safety impacts estimation of red light enforcement, which, however, cannot be easy to conduct. In this study, safety impacts was estimated for intersections of Chicago downtown area using SPF models and EB approach. As a result, for all crash types and target traffic accident types such as "angle", "rear end", "sideswipe in the same and other directions", "turn", and "head on", fatal crashes were reduced by 26% and 38%. However, RLE may increase property-demage-only-crashes by 3.23% and 1.16%, respectively.