One of the first steps in effectively managing a road network is to identify sites that require safety investigations. It is important that this process of identifying the ‘sites with promise’ be efficient because scarce resources may be wasted on sites that are incorrectly identified as unsafe and sites that are truly unsafe may not be flagged in this process. The original objectives of this research were to compare the performance of different screening methods and determine if particular method(s) are more optimal for identifying locations susceptible to cost-effective safety improvement. The investigation of the sites was scheduled to be done by NCDOT but could not be undertaken due to budget constraints. Hence, as an outcome of this project, the project team developed safety performance functions (SPFs) and developed a network screening algorithm that can be implemented to identify sites using methods discussed in the HSM. This algorithm was provided as a SAS program for NCDOT to use.
