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Economic Appraisal and Priority Ranking SafetyAnalyst permits users to conduct economic appraisals of the costs and safety benefits of any countermeasures selected for implementation. The economic appraisal results can be used to compare alternative countermeasures for a particular site and to develop improvement priorities across sites. SafetyAnalyst includes an optimization program capable of selecting a set of safety improvements that maximizes the systemwide safety benefits of a program of improvements within a specific improvement budget. Highway agencies currently use a variety of manual and automated methods for conducting economic appraisals of proposed countermeasures. Some current methods may be linked directly to an agency's accident records system, but others consist of spreadsheets into which data must be manually transferred. SafetyAnalyst provides a consistent approach to economic appraisal that is consistent with the requirements of the FHWA Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP), with data drawn from existing highway agency data files, while still providing flexibility for highway agencies to adapt the process to their own needs and policies. Highway agencies do not currently use formal optimization tools, but SafetyAnalyst allows an agency to determine that they are getting the most safety benefit possible for the dollars spent. SafetyAnalyst incorporates the best accident modification factors (AMFs) available to represent the safety effectiveness of specific countermeasures. A wide variety of AMFs have been used by highway agencies across the nation. Many of these AMFs are based on older evaluations that were not well designed and well executed. For example, many of these evaluations may be substantially affected by regression to the mean. SafetyAnalyst incorporates the most reliable estimate of the safety benefits for each improvement type, and these estimates will be updated as new research results become available. |
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FHWA
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