Evaluating Traffic Risk Indexes in Iran’s Rural Roads. Case Study: Ardabil-Meshkin Rural Road

Abstract

Abstract The main objective of this study is to rank the chief parameters and their important features which lead to rural roads accidents in Iran. To conduct this, an item as Risk Index is defined as the risk of a parameter and feature causing road accidents. Of all detected parameters, only five parameters and their features were chosen. Then Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to find the scores of Risk Indexes of each parameter and feature to rank them with regard to the two main criteria. These criteria were “Effect on Accidents Number” and “Effect on Accident Severity”. The data of this research was collected from two forms of questionnaires. Each of the 622 participants of this research filled both forms of the questionnaires. The results show that considering only Risk Index of main parameters in rural roads led to a big misunderstanding about detecting traffic accident causes. A comparison between obtained scores for both Risk Indexes of parameters and features clarifies that paying more attention to road features rather than road parameters can bring about detecting hazardous locations more accurately to assign limited budget to vulnerable locations in rural roads and decrease the rate of traffic accidents.