A hybrid model to identify effective factors in road transportation hazards and prioritize black spots (case study: Nezshabour-Sabzevar axis)

Transportation and communication are considered as one of the fundamental issues in economy. These phenomena are seen as one of the indicators of development of countries. Nowadays, traffic accidents have become one of the main issues in transportation as well as the economy in developing countries. Roads, human errors, vehicles and environment have important roles in occurrence of accidents. Modification or elimination of hazardous spots known as black spots have considerable influence on safety promotion, traffic reduction, accidents, losses, and waste reduction. Prioritization Methods could improve the black spots; mostly based on single criteria methods. In this paper, a new approach to rank the black spots in various roads is proposed using natural and environmental criteria. The roads of Sabzevar to Neishaboor and vice versa are studied as a real case to implement the proposed approach. Firstly the criteria are identified using literature review and experts' opinions and the weight of each qualitative and quantitative criteria is calculated by modified digital logic (MDL) method. Afterwards, 7 black spots are identified according to the statements of the ministry of roads and the required data are collected. Finally, the prioritization of mentioned black spots is conducted using group TOPSIS approach. As one of the contributions of this paper to the literature is the presentation of a set of comprehensive criteria consisting of 4 main criteria and 18 sub-criteria to evaluate black spots of which 4 sub criteria are proposed by this research. Furthermore, in this paper a combination of MDL and group TOPSIS is used to rank black spots which is a new approach in this area.
Results demonstrate that the three factors number fatal accidents, maximum speed limit, and number of injury accidents are the most important factors, respectively. Also, Zaferanie residential area has the highest importance among black spots.