Institute for Transportation

About the research

Engineering practitioners must balance safety and mobility when evaluating different construction phasing alternatives for highway work zones. There is a need for practitioner guidance and practical tools to assess work zone safety impacts as such resources are currently lacking. The objective of the study was to extend a structured safety assessment tool that was previously developed for freeways, expressways, and rural two-lane highways to include other facilities such as arterials, signalized intersections, unsignalized intersections, multi-lane highways, and ramps. Using Missouri data, this study introduces five new crash prediction models for work zones on urban multi-lane highways, arterials, ramps, signalized intersections, and unsignalized intersections. All the work zone models in this report are proposed for the first time. These work zone models are implemented in a user-friendly spreadsheet tool that automatically selects the appropriate model based on user input. The tool predicts crashes by severity, and computes the crash costs for each construction phasing alternative.