USE OF STATISTICAL DIAGNOSTICS AND PATTERN RECOGNITION METHODOLOGIES IN DEVELOPING SAFETY IMPROVEMENT STRATEGIES

Over the last 50 years of modern road building it was somehow implied that transportation engineering professionals will always know how to treat a high accident location once it has been identified, when in reality very little is known on the subject. There is no established course of instruction at the graduate level civil engineering curriculum that provides a definitive methodology on how to relate accident causality to the roadway environment. There is also very little reliable information on this subject in research literature. In medicine physicians are taught how to diagnose diseases and treat them. However, civil engineers are only taught to administer treatment (i.e. designing road safety improvements). The authors argue that traffic safety improvement strategies would be more effective if transportation engineers were taught diagnosis (i.e. how to conduct a safety analysis of a site) as well as treatment.