Safety Performance of Part-Time Shoulder Use on Freeways

Part-time shoulder use on freeways is an increasingly popular and practical performance-based design strategy for both reducing congestion and improving bus travel time and reliability. There are three types of part-time shoulder use: bus-on-shoulder (BOS), static shoulder use, and dynamic shoulder use. BOS is limited to authorized buses driven by trained drivers. Static shoulder use and dynamic shoulder use allow all or most vehicles to use the shoulder when it is open. Static shoulder use opens the shoulder to traffic on a fixed schedule while dynamic shoulder use opens the shoulder to traffic in response to overall traffic conditions. Sixteen states have one or more part-time shoulder use facilities in operation on freeways, many of which have opened within the past five to ten years. In 2016 FHWA published a guide on part-time shoulder use. That publication identified the lack of tools for quantifying the safety of part-time shoulder use as a major research gap. Only two safety studies of part-time shoulder use in the United States were cited, and each was focused on a single facility. Moreover, the current Highway Safety Manual (HSM) freeway models do not explicitly consider the potential safety performance of part-time shoulder use. Research is needed to help engineers and planners better understand both the safety performance of existing part-time shoulder use operations and the specific operational and design elements that influence (or appear to influence) their safety performance. The objectives of this research were to (1) develop quantitative tools for practitioners to use to evaluate safety performance of freeways with part-time shoulder use as a function of temporal, operational, and other conditions when the shoulder is open or closed to traffic, and (2) use the tools to determine the safety performance of part-time shoulder use, in order to better inform state DOT decision making on their application.

• Record URL:
  http://apps.trb.org/cmsfeed/TRBNetProjectDisplay.asp?ProjectID=4375

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Funding: $400000
• Contract Numbers:

  Project 17-89

• Sponsor Organizations:

  National Cooperative Highway Research Program

  Transportation Research Board
  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001

  American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO)

  444 North Capitol Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001

  Federal Highway Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Project Managers:

  Harrigan, Edward

• Performing Organizations:

  Kittelson and Associates, Incorporated

  610 S.W. Alder Street
  Portland, OR  United States  97205
• Principal Investigators:

  Jenior, Peter

• Start Date: 20180615
• Expected Completion Date: 20210630
• Actual Completion Date: 20210630
• Source Data: RiP Project 41643

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus lanes; Congestion management systems; Decision making; Evaluation and assessment; Freeway operations; Freeways; Highway design; Highway safety; Road shoulders; State departments of transportation
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01634975
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Transportation Research Board
• Contract Numbers: Project 17-89
• Files: TRB, RIP
• Created Date: May 19 2017 10:08AM