Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Establishment of a Composite Safety Index for Pavement Management

Abstract

Stephen A Arhin *,Asteway Ribbiso

One of the goals of local transportation agencies is to improve the quality of life for citizens and visitors by ensuring the efficient and safe movement of people and goods through the roadway system. Maintenance and rehabilitation of pavements are necessary to ensure that roadway networks continue to perform at their optimum. Currently, maintenance and rehabilitation of roadway networks depend on several factors including pavement condition indices, funding availability, among others. Previous studies have established relationships between crash frequency and pavement condition indices. However, the combined influence of speed, volume, and crash frequency on pavement indices, and thereby pavement management efforts has not been thoroughly examined. In this paper, a multinomial logistic regression was employed for 193 arterial segments to establish a new categorical variable: Composite Safety Index (CSI). The CSI values or ratings were based on pavement indices, crash frequency, traffic volumes and vehicular speeds to help categorize pavement sections for either maintenance or rehabilitation. The results indicated that the selected independent variables were statistically reliable in ranking pavement sections for rehabilitation or maintenance based on their CSI values.