Research on Driving Safety of Urban Interchange Ramp under Crosswind

During the last decade, urban interchange ramps were widely constructed in China, which also associated with a rapid increasing number of traffic accidents. Among various causal factors to traffic accidents, the environment factor, crosswind, has been proved to be correlated with occurrence of accidents happened on urban interchange ramp. In order to improve the traffic safety for urban interchange ramp, the impacts of crosswind on traffic safety were investigated in this paper. Using hot-wire anemometer, it is demonstrated that the wind speed at traffic accident hot spots is much bigger than that of the nearby weather station at the same time. Then several computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation models were developed to illustrate the impacts of crosswind on traffic safety. The results indicate that driving around the windward side on a ramp is the most dangerous situation compared to the other scenarios and the aerodynamic force of automobile can change significantly during overtaking process.