Routing Traffic for Community Health: The Case with Safety-Conscious Travelers

University Transportation Centers Program2019PDFTech ReportMa, RuiZhang, MichaelCenter for Transportation, Environment, and Community HealthUniversity of California, Davis. Department of Civil and Environmental EngineeringUnited States. Department of Transportation. University Transportation Centers (UTC) ProgramUnited States. Department of Transportation. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and TechnologyCenter for Transportation, Environment, and Community Health. (CTECH) (UTC)United StatesAwarenessNetwork analysis (Planning)Numerical analysisPublic healthRoute choiceTraffic assignmentTraffic flowTraffic safetyTravel time69A355174711912/01/2017 \u2013 09/30/2019Safety awareness among travelers has become one of the influential factors on travelers' choice behaviors. Yet most existing studies on vehicular routing or traffic assignment problems largely assume that travelers' route choice is only based on travel time instead of considering safety awareness. This report summarizes the effort of implementing the safety awareness indexes into consideration for link-node-based travelers' route choices. Such safety awareness indexes are associated with the average accident risk on each road segment on the travelers' routes, which was dependent on traffic volumes and road types. Through numerical studies on three different networks, it is found that the resulting traffic flow pattern from safety awareness based route choices, either in term of user equilibrium or system optimum, are significant different from their counterparts based on travel time.137