Exploring the transferability of safety performance functions

Safety performance functions (SPFs), by predicting the number of crashes on roadway facilities, have been a vital tool in the highway safety area. The SPFs are typically applied for identifying hot spots in network screening and evaluating the effectiveness of road safety countermeasures. The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) provides a series of SPFs for several crash types by various roadway facilities. The SPFs, provided in the HSM, were developed using data from multiple states. In regions without local jurisdiction based SPFs it is common practice to adopt national SPFs for crash prediction. There has been little research to examine the viability of such national level models for local jurisdictions. Towards understanding the influence of SPF transferability, we examine the rural divided multilane highway models from Florida, Ohio, and California. Traffic, roadway geometry and crash data from the three states are employed to estimate single-state SPFs, two-state SPFs and three-state SPFs. The SPFs are estimated using the negative binomial model formulation for several crash types and severities. To evaluate transferability of models, we estimate a transfer index that allows us to understand which models transfer adequately to other regions. The results indicate that models from Florida and California seem to be more transferable compared to models from Ohio. More importantly, we observe that the transfer index increases when we used pooled data (from two or three states). Finally, to assist in model transferability, we propose a Modified Empirical Bayes (MEB) measure that provides segment specific calibration factors for transferring SPFs to local jurisdictions. The proposed measure is shown to outperform the HSM calibration factor for transferring SPFs.