Bypassing dangerous sections of the route as a way to improve traffic safety (using St. Petersburg as an example)

Abstract

A simple routing algorithm to improve vehicle safety on a road network has been proposed. If the road network is represented by a graph with edges and nodes, it is enough to mark most populated with Traffic Accidents (TA) edges by adding to a attribute of the edge some penalty and the routing algorithm (Dijkstra or Bellman-Ford) will try to avoid this edge automatically. To estimate safety gain, a Relative Risk Ratio RRR= (TAs along route which avoids TA hotspots/TAs along original route) was used. Computer simulation was performed for St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. It is shown that for the same start and end points of the route, an average RRR gets smaller by 14.5–36 % depending on original route length. It is also shown that the cost for improving vehicle safety is an increase in the route length (by 8–10 %) and an increase in the number of nodes in the route by 3–12 % is required.