Using Kinetic Energy to Evaluate the Severity of Different Types of Traffic Conflict at Signalized Intersections

Traffic conflict is a surrogate safety measure which has been widely used for evaluating the safety of an entity. In past years, numerous studies have been conducted to evaluate the severity of traffic conflicts. Traditionally, time to collision (TTC) and distance to collision (DTC) were used by transportation professionals for defining the severity of traffic conflicts. However, the current research on traffic conflict severity does not reflect the possible injury of potential crashes. The primary objective of this study is to use kinetic energy to evaluate the severity of different types of traffic conflicts. Seven different types of traffic conflicts at signalized intersections were considered in this study. To achieve the research objective, researchers use kinetic energy as the measure of conflict severity. In order to get the seven different types of conflicts' kinetic energy indicators, traffic conflict data were collected at 9 intersections in the Nanjing area in China. The severities of the seven types of conflicts were conducted by kinetic energy. The results of the research can be directly used by transportation professionals for determining the severity of different types of traffic conflict. More importantly, the conflict severity based on kinetic energy can be considered an indicator of the severity of potential collisions.