Provincial highway safety is one of the most important issues in transportation. To evaluate or assess the safety performance of provincial highway, traffic crash analysis or traffic conflict analysis has been used for a long history. However, it is very difficult and time-consuming to obtain historical crash data or traffic conflict data. This study analyzes the provincial highways' accident data during 2006–2010, and the characteristics of provincial highway have been investigated; in addition the influencing elements are identified. A comprehensive approach is introduced to evaluate provincial highway safety performance and corresponding models are developed considering the accidents, geometrics, facilities, and traffic environment. The approach will also result in a safety index to indicate the safety performance level of the provincial highway. In this paper, the approach (called safety evaluation approach) is practically applied to evaluate the safety performance of some provincial highways in Hebei Province. Results from the real application indicate that the approach has good applicability and can be used by field safety engineers. 1. Introduction Road safety has become a priority field worldwide and one of the major factors describing the state of the transport system with its positive and negative changes [1], especially provincial highway safety, which is one of the most important issues to be resolved by traffic engineers. According to past statistics, in China, about 32% of traffic crashes and 34% of fatal traffic crashes happen on the provincial highway [2]. These statistical data indicate that provincial highway is the place of significant safety concerns. There is a need to have a practically feasible way to evaluate provincial highway safety performance specifically. In order to improve highway traffic safety performance, many research studies have been done. The most popular methods to analyze traffic safety performance are based on traffic crash analysis methods, such as crash frequency, crash rate, crash severity, and crash statistic models [3, 4]. However, all these crash-based analyses are based on past historical crash data. Accumulating crash data could be a problem to many researchers, mainly due to the difficulty to obtain these data and the reliability of past crash data [5]. For example, to determine the black spots with high traffic crash rates in China, it usually needs to take about 3 to 10 years to accumulate traffic crash data. In fact, within the time period, land use situation could change, resulting in biased safety
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