Utilization of Methods of Spatial Analysis in Road Safety Evaluation

Network screening is an important step in road safety analysis. Statistical techniques are currently available and have been integrated in the Highway Safety Manual and the SafetyAnalyst software. However, analysis can still be complex to conduct. Several alternative approaches that use spatial analysis methods are identified and applied to collision data from the Ontario Provincial highway network. The results are compared to those of SafetyAnalyst. The results demonstrated the potential of the spatial analysis methods as a network screening tool, particularly the Local Moran I index method. In addition, with the ability of the spatial analysis methods to identify clusters of a specific type of collisions, they can be easily used in speed management efforts in order to identify clusters of speed-related collisions.