Ranking of hazardous road locations in two-lane two-way rural roads with no crash record

Crash data availability is a significant requirement for identifying hazardous roads. However, for roads with poor data sets or no crash record, a method is needed to find and rank road segments independent of the crash records. In this paper, an auditing based methodology is proposed to determine the hazardous locations. A Rural road is investigated by decomposing it first into six elements, and then into safety factors corresponding to each element. The elements are: straight segments, horizontal and vertical curves, bridges, tunnels, merges and intersections, and side road land use. The relative contribution of the elements to the safety of a road segment is determined using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) via a system of weights which are suggested by an expert panel. Subject to a consistency test of the expert responses, AHP determines the weight of elements. In an independent survey, roads are audited and ranked with respect to their elements. The weighted sum of these ranks is used to calculate a Safety Index (SI) for a road segment. Road segments with the lowest values of SI are identified as the most hazardous locations