Synthesis of Safety for Traffic Operations - Transports Canada

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Traffic operations practitioners are continually making decisions that impact on the safety
performance of the transportation network. In order to make the best possible decisions
the practitioner must be aware of the best available evidence on safety. The trouble is
that the road safety knowledge base is expanding and it is difficult for the practitioner to
keep abreast of the conventional wisdom. Moreover, once found, critically appraising,
and determining the usefulness of safety-operations research is a daunting task.
Practitioners are in need of a document that synthesizes the safety impacts of various
traffic operations and control strategies for their day-to-day use. This Synthesis is
intended to serve that purpose. It contains information on the safety impacts of traffic
operations and control strategies that are most urgent/useful to practitioners, and attempts
to highlight the conditions in which the impacts are likely to be realized.
The overarching goals of this Synthesis are to promote evidence-based road safety
(EBRS) among the Canadian transportation sector, and to help Canada achieve its
objective of making Canadian roads the safest in the world. EBRS is the conscientious
and judicious use of current best evidence in providing road safety for individuals,
facilities, and transportation systems.
Mindful of the above goals, the Synthesis was developed with the following objectives:
• Focus on traffic operations and control strategies;
• The target audience is practitioners and other transportation professionals that
make decisions and recommendations respecting traffic operations and control
strategies;
• Include research and studies that report on crash occurrence, crash severity, or
crash surrogates with a proven correlation to crashes; and
• As much as possible synthesize Canadian research using Canadian datasets.
This last objective proved to be overly optimistic. At the start of the project it was
believed that practitioners had a vast storehouse of traffic safety research that was
unpublished. As it turns out, this is not the case. While certainly some information is
unpublished and residing in government files, it appears that mainly due to human and
financial resource limitations, practitioners are not undertaking evaluations.
In order to identify the issues and information that would be most valuable to Canadian
practitioners, a technical advisory team comprised of provincial and municipal
transportation engineering professionals from across Canada was assembled and
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