Effectiveness of Inexpensive Crash Countermeasures to Improve Traffic Safety

Highway safely improvement is a critical issue for local and national transportation authorities. One of the most important tasks in highway safety analysis is the identification of appropriate countermeasures that might be useful in making signicant safety improvement. Targeting safety at roadway segments has been the key focus of safety related projects at all levels. Recognizing that resources are limited in Louisiana, an emphasis is provided on the identication of strategies that will yield impressive results that are easily implemented from both time and cost perspective. An extensive study on the selection of Louisiana specific inexpensive and effective countermeasures has not been performed yet. Safety countermeasures with high safety effects and low implementation costs are always preferable. This dissertation has developed a Six Sigma DMADV tool uniquely designed for determining effective, inexpensive countermeasures that can be used in both aggregate and disaggregate level. Using the framework of DMADV toolset, this dissertation has selected three inexpensive countermeasures suitable for Louisiana and has developed CMFs for the selected countermeasures. Moreover, a commercialization tool has been developed for transferring the research results to successful commercial product design. The results from this dissertation are practice-ready and has been used by the transportation authorities in Louisiana