Operating speed prediction models for sustainable road safety managment

Road safety management may be improved if quantitative assessment of safety levels is carried out. One of the most frequent roadway characteristics that affect crashes is the geometric alignment. Many highway design standards in the world have introduced rules to assess the alignment consistency. In this paper we report an experimental analysis conducted in 2010 on statistically significant number of roadway sections belonging to two ‐ lane rural highways in Northern Italy. The aim of this research is to develop operating speed prediction models on tangents and circular curves. Acquired relationships were particularly interesting and different explanatory variables were introduced in the predictive models which are dependent on examined geometric roads features. These relationships constitute a new set of models about the operating speeds to design and verify geometric highways alignments adding to those already available in the scientific literature.