Using traffic microsimulation to evaluate potential crashes: some results

Traffic microsimulation has been used extensively to evaluate consequences of different traffic planning and control policies in terms of travel time delays, queues, pollutant emissions and every other common measured performance while at the same time traffic safety has not been considered in common traffic microsimulation packages as a measure of performance for different traffic scenarios. The absence of safety evaluation with microscopic simulation models is due to a lack of complete and established models for the simulation of potential crashes. Commonly-used procedures for safety evaluation with microscopic simulation have been based on traffic conflict theory which until recently was not extended to single vehicle crashes and to crashes between vehicles which are moving on non-conflicting trajectories. This paper presents some applications of a new procedure based on potential crash events simulation for the evaluation of safety levels in microsimulated traffic scenarios which takes into account also potential crashes with road side objects and barriers.