Graduation Year

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.S.C.E.

Degree Granting Department

Civil Engineering

Major Professor

Pan Liu, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

Jian Lu., Ph.D.

Committee Member

Pei-sung Lin, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Edward Mierzejewski, Ph.D.

Keywords

Lane balance, Exit ramp, Ramp configuration, Hypothesis test, Generalized regression model

Abstract

The primary objective of the study is to evaluate safety performances of different exit ramps used in Florida and nationally. More specific, the research objectives include the following two parts: (1) to evaluate the impacts of different exit ramp types on safety performance for freeway diverge areas; and (2) to identify the different factors contributing to the crashes happening on the exit ramp sections. To achieve the research objectives, the research team investigated crash history at 424 sites throughout Florida. The study area includes two parts, the freeway diverge area and the exit ramp sections. For the freeway diverge areas, exit ramp types were defined based on the number of lanes used by vehicular traffic to exit freeways. Four exit ramp types were considered here including single-lane exit ramps (Type 1), sing-lane exit ramps without a taper (Type 2), two-lane exit ramps with an optional lane (Type 3), and two-lane exit ramps without an optional lane (Type 4). For the exit ramp sections, four ramp configurations, including diamond, out connection, free-flow loop and parclo loop, were considered.

Cross-sectional comparisons were conducted to compare crash frequency, crash rate, crash severity and crash types between different exit ramp groups. Crash predictive models were also built to quantify the impacts of various contributing factors. On the freeway diverge areas, it shows that Type 1 exit ramp has the best safety performance in terms of the lowest crash frequency and crash rate. The crash prediction model shows that for one-lane exit ramp, replacing a Type 1 with a Type 2 will increase crash counts at freeway diverge areas by 15.57% while replacing a Type 3 with a Type 4 will increase crash counts by 10.80% for two-lane ramps. On the exit ramp sections, the out connection ramps appear to have the lowest average crash rate than the other three. The crash predictive model shows that replacing an out connection exit ramp with a diamond, free-flow, and parclo loop will increase crashes counts by 26.90%, 68.47% and 48.72% respectively. The results of this study will help transportation decision makers develop tailored technical guidelines governing the selection of the optimum design combinations on freeway diverge areas and exit ramp sections.

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