Road safety performance assessment: a new road network Risk Index for info mobility

The development of communication systems for road traffic safety improvement has become one of the most important aims of information technology for road users. Detecting risk factors and informing drivers about them can contribute to make the transportation system more safe and comfortable. This assumption is the base of the Research Project "M2M Mobile to Mobility" carried out at the University of Calabria, Italy. This research presents first applications of a methodology for developing a road safety performance index, Risk Index (RI), related to the risk deriving from infrastructure's features. In detail six different classes of events are identified: number of occurred accidents; density of intersections/accesses on the road section; road surface anomalies; problems related to both horizontal and vertical road signs and deficiencies of roadside and safety barriers. The research is focused on the possibility of giving real time 'information to road users about the risks associated to the specific travelled road segment, using a multiplatform mobile application and GPS system. The information is given to drivers considering driver's speeds (operating and average speeds) that are registered continuously by the application. In order to reach this aim, the road network is discretized with a squared grid: each node derived from the intersection of the grid with the infrastructure's network is considered as an informative node which contains the information related to an area, centered on the same node (RIi). This step represents just the initialization of the road network, which will be enriched with new points generated by users trips uploaded through an automatic server-side. According to this procedure, the road network will be more "information-rich" as many users will use the platform, according to a user-generated schema. When the single driver is approaching to the 'i-th node, he may be 'informed on the Risk Index associated to the relative area and he simultaneously provides its speed at server. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.