| dc.description.abstract | Despite existing countermeasures for addressing wrong-way driving, crashes relating to wrong-way driving continue to occur on Texas roads. These crashes tend to be more severe than typical crashes since they tend to be head-on collisions at high speeds. This study considers a countermeasure designed to use connected vehicle communications, on high-speed, controlled access, freeway-type facilities. This study quantifies the impacts of a connected vehicle wrong-way driving countermeasure (CV-WWD) system, translates them into a benefit-cost ratio that represents the economic value of the system, and performs the analysis on a generic case and case study to draw conclusions on potential deployment needs for the system.
To determine the probability that a vehicle received a warning about the wrong-way driver (WWD) early enough to be able to make an informed decision earlier than if they were not equipped, calculations were done to determine vehicle presence, connected vehicle capability probability, and successful warning message transmission. The increased time for response was translated into reduced crash probability for various market penetration rates (MPRs) of connected vehicles. Each analysis used the baseline scenario as the case where the MPR of zero, representing no connected vehicles, was used as a baseline for the economic analysis. Reduced crash probability for a single event was used to estimate the benefit over the life of the system. The benefit-cost ratio was this benefit divided by the cost of the system.
The findings of the study indicate that the WWD crash rate is the driving factor for economic feasibility. Each traffic density considered had similar MPRs for feasibility across each crash rate, with a rate of one WWD crash ever five years needing about 37 percent MPR and a rate of once a year only needing 17 percent MPR to break even. The case study on US-75 in downtown Dallas, TX, which has a crash rate of 1.8 WWD crashes per year, showed that a system installed there could be feasible with an MPR as low as seven percent. These results show that the system has potential to be economically feasible at low MPRs with a sufficiently high crash rate. | en |
