حمیدرضا بهنود

The theory of planned behavior has been used in various studies to understand human behavior in various traffic studies, including the understanding of the risky behavior of drivers. Considering the importance of violation in the occurrence of accidents, we tried to measure the contribution of each human factor in its occurrence and analyze the existing relationships between them according to the theory of planned behavior. According to the use of this theory, a large number of independent and dependent parameters were found in the research, and structural equation modeling was used to analyze and investigate the relationships between them. Also, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was used for statistical analysis of data. A strong relationship was found between the driver's Intention toward violations and the frequency of accidents. The structures examined in this theory, which included attitude and subjective norms and perceived behavioral control, directly affected the driver's Intention a violation. The greatest impact belonged to the variable of the first scenario, which included a special category of indicators. These indicators included the indicators used in the discussion of perceived behavioral control and subjective norms in the descriptive norms section, which were used simultaneously in an item titled the first scenario. In the positions after that, the attitude and second scenario were placed. The second scenario included a group of indicators that examined subjective norms in the brief norms section. Also, a significant relationship was found between the two variables of slip and error with the frequency of accidents.

Pedestrians are one of the most vulnerable users of urban roads that are directly exposed to accidents. Traffic crashes tend to be spatially dependent and is a phenomenon known as spatial dependence. The objectives of this study include identifying alternative variables for pedestrians in urban roads and identifying accident-prone areas using pedestrian exposure variables, as well as demonstrating the efficiency of spatial models in predicting pedestrian crashes. In this study, in the first step, which is the identification of exposure variables, several statistical methods have been used to identify these variables. Also, the frequency of pedestrian crashes has been predicted using six widely used models of spatial statistics, which have been evaluated based on pedestrian crash data in Tehran for the years 1396-1398. The results of this study show that the prediction of the frequency of pedestrian crashes using Poisson regression models with zero-inflated geographical weight and distribution of zero-inflated negative geographical binomials has better results based on model selection criteria than other models. This study has shown the dispersion and density of pedestrian accidents without having the volume of pedestrians and thus can be done by taking safety measures in places prone to pedestrian crashes, social costs and casualties. In this study, the use of various geographical weighted regression models to evaluate the relationship between sociological variables and crash frequencies at the area level was appropriate. Comparison of the performance of geographic weighted regression models shows the existence of significant spatial heterogeneity in the analysis.

Composite indicators are the collection of a group of sub-indicators to measure multidimensional principles that can't be measured by one indicator. Utilizing Composite Indicators (CIS) as like beneficial tools to assess overall performance of transportation safety analysis has extended of recent times. Amongst many models, the Data Envelopment Analysis Model (DEA) is these days an essential tool of constructing CIs amongst different performance methodologies these days. But DEA assumes that all data are specific or quantitative values to be used in basic DEA-based CI models. However, in some problems, the observed values of input and output data are sometimes imprecise or fuzzy statistics due to there are many variables in the road safety that follows natural ambiguity and often there ​​are imprecise values, which can only be represented by qualitative data. In this study, we studied two methods within the DEA framework for modeling quantitative and qualitative data within the context of constructing composite indicators. There are Imprecise DEA (IDEA) and Fuzzy DEA (FDEA) models respectively. Based on their principle, new models of IDEA-CIs and FDEA- CIs are obtained in the assessment of road safety management via developing a composite indicator of road safety for 30 countries round the world. Comparing the results are obtained from the two models with the primary data confirms the efficiency and reliability of the two models. In the end, targets were calculated for inefficient countries then Benchmarks were set and road safety strategies were prioritized for them.

The problem of road lighting during the night hours is an influential factor on road crashes. Usually, a smaller share of trips is performed in darker hours of the night, but these hours are exposed to a large part of road crashes. The objective of this study is to determine the Crash Modification Factor for nightly crashes following the installation of lighting systems in rural roads. In this study, by comparing the data related to the frequency of crashes before and after the application of lighting equipment in the considered segments, the safety effectiveness of lighting in rural roads was measured by before-after study using the Empirical Bayesian method and the CMF for implementing the lighting supply operation was calculated. According to the data adopted from Road Maintenance and Transportation Organization, in several roadways located in three provinces of Guilan, Golestan and Semnan in 2014, light poles were installed, in which 35 segments in multi-lane roadways and 12 segments in two-way two-lane roadways were selected as treatment sites. Resulted by the EB method, the CMF value with the 95 percent significance level was estimated 0.226 for multi-lane segments and 0.445 for two-way two-lane segments. This significant effect of lighting projects was measured only for nightly crashes and in road locations where known as eligible due to the effects of adverse weather condition like the foggy mountainous roads.

One of the problems with the instantaneous speed control systems is that the speed of passing cars is only checked at certain points of the track and drivers' behavior is not at all possible. The main objective of this research is to evaluate the effect of speed reduction by installing average speed cameras in rural roads. In this study, using the statistical models of the hypothesis testing and the time series, the rate of vehicle speed decrease was compared to the non-camera mode and the speed changes after installing and setting up average speed cameras have been investigated. The studied roadways have average speed cameras, and the information and timing of these cameras have been received from the Road Maintenance and Transportation Organization. In general, the average speed of vehicles before the installation of cameras was 89.66 kilometer per hour and after the installation of cameras was 84.08, which shows a decrease of 58.5 kilometer per hour. The mean percentage of average reduction was 25.5 percent which indicates an acceptable level. According to the results of the test, at the 95 percent confidence level, in the six axes of the nine axes examined, the average vehicle speed decreased significantly. This does not mean that there were no decrease in other axes, but that speed was not significantly reduced. On the whole, the effect of average speed cameras on vehicle speed reduction on roadways with lower traffic volume was higher than that of high-volume roads.

Run-Off-the-Road crashes (including: overturning, outgoing or fixed object crashes) form a considerable part of all rural road crashes and delineation generally affects them. This study aims at evaluating longitudinal delineation using pavement markings and its combination with the road pavement raised markers in the reduction of rural road crashes. Thereafter, the crash modification factor (CMF) will be found applying the before-after study on several treatment sites. In order to, traffic and crash data and the other required data for evaluating with empirical Bayes method gathered in Khorasan Razavi province in year 2014 as the treatment year for delineation activities.

A mainstep towards safety management system is identifying hazardous road locations. This can be implemented in either project or site-specific level. Many situations especially like optimizing and allocating safety budgets within a jurisdiction; Prioritizing corridors for inspection, scheduling and distributing Police patrols and mobile emergency management and lack of enough precision in crash data over the segment level, application of project-level Empirical Bayes method would give an appropriate estimation of project-level(corridor) crashes in order to identify corridors with promise. The present study is an application and introduction of project-level EB method based on fatal and injury crashes of khorasan Razavi province using 1391&92 crash data. For this to achieve, safety performance functions with the aid of generalized linear model assuming negative binomial distribution for error term were separately developed for each severity level. For developing the models 69 homogeneous from 31 corridors of khorasan Razavi province were addressed. Then, through aggregating crash recorded data and estimated ones over the segments of each corridor using project-level EB method an appropriate estimation of 31 corridors were obtained; therefore, prioritizing was fulfilled. The results revealed that road type and vehicle-kilometer driven (VKT) had a significant effect on crashes across different injury levels. Evaluating the models according R2adj and cumulative residual plot (CSR) indicated that the models have satisfactory performance at 95% significant level. Eventually, Sabzevar-Kahak, Baghcheh-Torbat Heidarie and Sarakhas-Mashad were prioritized as the triplicate first ranks for further investigation.

Most crash prediction models in two-way two-lane roads describe the geometric characteristics. This study measures the role of abutting land uses in declining the road safety conditions. The objectives of this study are: (1) Developing a composite index that explains the road safety condition in the road segments running through various land uses; (2) Identifying the land use related roadside hazards that influence the road safety; (3) Determining the share of each land use related factor; and (4) Developing applied methods to enhance roadside safety abutted by land uses. In this study, 74 kilometers of Karaj-Chaloos Road were analyzed using the Data Envelopment Analysis. This method was used to define the resulted efficiency score as a composite index which can best define the safety status in terms of quantitative and qualitative measures. In each segment, the land uses were analyzed in terms of three criteria including the land use density, driveway density, and the roadside hazards utilizing the existing plans and field studies. The measures of these criteria were considered as the imput values of the DEA model. The outputs in the Data Envelopment Analysis model were inversed values of expected crash frequencies which were estimated by compounding the predicted and observed crash frequencies through the Empirical Bayesian methodology. The results by the Data Envelopment Analysis show that the roadside hazards due to abutting land uses would strongly affect the safety indx after which the driveway density and land use density would stand as the second and third factors respectively.

The development of technology along with the development of facilities for modern and comfortable life brings some disadvantages as well as environmental problems, it consists of five categories of air pollution, water, soil, heat and noise pollution. In the meantime, the issue of noise pollution in cities is a global problem in most countries, In most developing countries, they are also striving for rapid industrial development to improve the countrychr('39')s economic and social conditions. Of course, In the absence of proper control, this growth along with improving the quality of life in these countries will lead to environmental pollution, including the most important of which is noise pollution, in the absence of proper control. Noise pollution is of particular importance due to the potential for physiological and psychological effects on humans. There has been significant growth in noise pollution from man-made sources over the past 100 years, which now doubles every 10 years. Therefore, evaluation of problem and functional planning to control noise pollution and its harmful effects is an essential issue for the community. Noise pollution that is different from other types of pollution due to its source and emission characteristics. Sources of noise pollution in urban areas can be divided into two groups: Fixed sources and moving sources. Fixed sources include: industrial, construction and demolition, commercial, local and recreational. Moving resources include ground and air transportation. In urban areas, the engine and exhaust system of cars, light trucks, buses and motorcycles is an important source of noise pollution, that have major environmental impacts. Traffic noise pollution is the most important source of environmental noise pollution in cities. The main objective of the paper is to find the relationships between noise and traffic characteristics, and also to examine the impact of each one separately, so that we can find out the importance of each variable in noise pollution we will find suitable solutions to reduce the noise pollution. In this study, which was carried out at one of the important intersections of Qazvin, data including equivalent sound level, the volume of vehicles by type, traffic light timing at picked up time, distance from picked up point to intersection center, number of beeps at the time of picked up which is heard, that data was estimated at 94 points, Points were located at 10 m distance on the edge of the street and If there was an open space, points were expanded, and there were two picked up for each point .The results of modeling showed that the most important variables affecting the sound equivalent level includes the volume of vehicles, especially heavy and semi-heavy vehicles (with the impacts of 0.025, 0.125, 0.526, 0.489 for cars, motors, semi-heavy vehicles and trucks, respectively,) the green time of the approach 1 and the number horns honked in this period (with the impact of 0.05 dB per second, and .08 dB per honk, respectively), are the variables that influence the equivalent sound level at this intersection.

Comparing and evaluating the road safety performance is desirable in trans-national levels, because each country can achieve a better and deeper understanding of its road safety status. In this study, a subset of multi-criteria decision-making methods, called the outranking methods, including PROMETHEE and ELECTRE methods was used to evaluate the road safety performance. In these methods, the Analytical Hierarchy Process method is used to obtain the weights of the indicators, which are used as input weights in the PROMETHEE and ELECTRE models. The methods were used for Iran and a set of developing countries in order to examine the situation in Iran compared to the others. Then, the results being compared with the number of road fatalities per hundred thousand people for these countries as the reference point. According to the results it was found that, among the five road safety pillars, the pillar of road safety management is the most important and the pillar of post-crash response is the least important one. Also, the lead agency sub-pillar is the highest importance in the road safety management pillar and the child restraint sub-pillar is the least importance in the safer road users pillar from expert's point of view. Among the 15 countries studied in this study, Poland found the highest rank and is known as the best-performing country. In between, Iran ranked 13th, reflecting Iran's relatively poor performance against other countries.

Traffic lights are considered as a way to improve traffic safety andperformance at intersections. Lots of crashes occur at intersections. There aremany accidents at intersections and these accidents cause financial losses,injuries, and even death. This research was carried out to predict the crashseverity of lighted intersections in Qazvin city, and examines the variables thataffect the incidence of severe accidents. Accident data were used base onQazvin police reports and data provided by Qazvin municipality traffictransportation department that includes 288 accidents at the 38 lightedintersections of the Qazvin city in the years 2014 to 2016. The accidents reportdescribes the circumstances in which an accident occurred. The accidents wereranked in three categories according to their severity including damage, injuryand fatal accidents that based on statistics (128 damages, 156 injury and 4fatalities). Sequential logit model was used in this research. The results showthat the presence of some variables such as accident time in the day, rate ofintersection volume and the existence of an island actually reduces thelikelihood of occurrence of a accident with a high severity. In contrast, thepresence of some variables such as accidents in summer, type of collision, howto collide, pedestrian traffic and the number of lanes, actually increases thelikelihood of accidents with a high severity.

Traffic accidents are one of the most important causes of death in the world, which imposes significant economic burdens on societies, and estimates of the cost of these accidents are important. The purpose of this study is to estimate the costs of accidents by applying willingness to pay approach to vehicle deivers of vehicles with different conditions and for crashes with different intensities. For this purpose, the study has been carried out on urban roads in Tehran. Based on this, the costs of accidents for vehicle drivers and, finally, a model for achieving it are addressed. Research variables include personal characteristics such as age, gender, and degree of education. The statistical significance of life has been an important parameter in the research of willingness to pay. The statistical significance of life for one death based on the average willingness to pay drivers and in terms of decreasing the risk of death from 26.5 per 100 thousand population are decreased by half, is estimated equal to 29.6 billion rials. Accordingly, for the total traffic deaths has been obtained the total figure of 5603 trillion rials. This amount was 3.6 billion Rials per injured, according to the average daily payment for each injury, and according to the number of injuries, about 319 thousand people a year have been 1153.7 billion Rials. Accordingly, and according to available statistics and information, about 6.5 percent of gross national income is related to the cost of traffic accidents that are lost in these accidents.

Between in-vehicle tools, cell phone use while driving is known as distraction sources in the world. This issue is even more important because of the increased accidents and losses caused by driving it. The purpose of this study was to investigate driver behavior and determine the factors affecting the use of cell phone while driving.

To achieve the goal, the theory of planned behavior was used. A questionnaire was designed based on this theory and collected in Gorgan city. The “factor analysis’ method was used to evaluate the factors affecting the use of cell phone while driving.

Results showed that among the five important factors of driving behavior, perceived behavioral control, explained 25.32, had highest impact on cell phone use while driving. also, other factors like addicted to mobile phone and demographic characteristics were the second and third cause of mobile phone use while driving.

The results indicate that the driver is convinced that he is controlling his behavior and is able to react quickly and responsibly against unexpected events (such as the sudden braking of a car while using a cell phone), among all of variable, this variable is the most important that cause use of cell phone. Therefore, So, authorities should pay attention to the mentioned shortcomings and attempt to take a helpful strike for reforming them.

Safety of urban highways is one of the most important issues in traffic management of big cities, which is typically influenced by several factors including implementing specific lanes and stations of public transit. This study evaluates the safety effects of implementing a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lane on frequency of crashes in urban highways. In this study, 14 treatment sites were selected for a before-after study and 40 reference sites in terms of geometric and traffic similarities were selected for development of Safety Performance Functions (SPFs). Crash data for three years before and three years after implementing the BRT lane were used to evaluate the effectiveness by the means of Empirical Bayesian (EB) method. Only mid-block crashes were involved in the analysis. The Crash Modification Factor (CMF) was estimated 0.87 at a 95% confidence interval that reduces the total number of crashes By 12.58%. The Empirical Bayesian (EB) method because of eliminating the Regression-To-Mean (RTM) effect can precisely estimate the number of crashes and effective factors in reducing them. The EB method estimated the expected frequency of crashes using both predicted and observed frequencies. The range of crash reduction varied between 1.25 to 65.6 percent.

One of the most important aspects of human presence in urban spaces, which causes the vitality and dynamism of these spaces, as well as their social role, is the pedestrian movement. Pedestrians are vulnerable road users and damages to them are often irreparable and irreversible and cause injury or death. The purpose of this study was to determine the percentage of using pedestrian bridges in Tehran as well as environmental and human factors affecting the use or non-use of pedestrians crossing at the bridge's influence. Several environmental factors such as the median pedestrian barriers as well as human factors such as the age and the personal characteristics were considered in this study. In this research, decision was made in a fuzzy environment, which is a multi-value environment. The knowledge base used in an expert system is formed using fuzzy logic and could be used as a fuzzy decision support system for managing and planning for the construction of new pedestrian bridges or for modifying existing bridges. The results of this research can be used to identify high-capacity bridges for equipping other bridges, locating for the construction of new bridges, assessing the status of each bridge and its use. The results show that the most effective factors for using the overpasses by pedestrians were the bridge facilities among the environmental factors and the perceived identity among the human factors. Having compared the results of this study using the fuzzy reasoning model with the real outputs show a 98 percent correlation and the 20 percent error in estimating the probability for using the pedestrian overpass to cross the street.  

Vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians, have an increased rate of death and injury due to the consequences of traffic crashes. The knowledge of willingness to pay for crossing the street easier and safer will help policy makers to identify the best policies to be complemented. This study focus on the willingness to pay for facilitating pedestrians’ cross passing and, increasing safety while crossing the street.
In this study, three different scenarios including crossing the street with zebra crossing facilities, crossing the street with zebra crossing facilities and installing pedestrian traffic light, and constructing a pedestrian bridge equipped with escalator has presented. The research was conducted based on a stated preference method and a questionnaire which asked about pedestrians’ demographic characteristics, travel characteristics and scenarios. The studied sample size was 384 random pedestrians in Qazvin city that they have been asked the willingness to pay for increasing the safety of their crossing in one of the major cross in the city. For each of the scenarios, four different payments are presented and for each proposed payment of each scenario a logit model has been adopted.
The results show that age, education, car ownership and level of household income have significant relationship with willingness to pay. The older pedestrians have less willingness to pay in each of three scenarios. With increasing the level of education and number of car ownership among pedestrians, the willingness to pay in the first and third scenarios increases. The pedestrians with more than 40 million Iran Rials household income have the willingness to pay for making their crossing safer but others do not.
It can be concluded that among the policies, which have been mentioned through scenarios in the questionnaire, in cases that there is a willingness to pay, the scenario of crossing the street with zebra crossing facilities and installing pedestrian traffic light with a willingness to pay of 10,000 Iran Rials is the most frequent.

Functional capacity index refers to the severity of the injury and results from one year after the injury. Since this work is defined as one of the cost components associated with the health burden of traffic injuries, the search for a small amount of it in this study is on the agenda. The functional capacity index divides one person's normal abilities into 10 major sections and allocates to each sector a coefficient of between 0 and 1 in order to provide a quantitative indication of a predicted decline in the functional capacity of the injured person. To quantify the effect of reducing the capacity of function, the information needed to calculate its cost includes the classification of severity of injury; functional capacity index per severity of injury, duration of treatment, total time affected by capacity reduction and accumulated costs. In the classification of injuries, the first group with an average cost of 120 dollars account for the cost of light injuries sustained for a parity of 87% of the injured. The most severe level of injuries, with an average cost of 150 dollars, is less than one thousandth of the injured. Based on this classification, the total cost of reducing the functional capacity for all injured in 2011 was about 26 million dollars. The cost per person with light injuries was about 2 dollars and the highest level of injury was more than 2600 dollars, and the average cost per person injured in traffic accidents in 2011 was 6 dollars.

Providing sufficient road skid resistance is an important and inevitable measure. The current study seeks for the technical feasibility for testing the effects of various percentages of recycled asphalt pavements in macro and micro textures of road surface on the road skid resistance. In this study, 15 macro texture plus 15 micro texture samples were used incorporating various contents of recycled asphalt pavements. The British Pendulum was used as the tool for this end. The resulted values of skid number were analyzed using the t-test value. In addition, a case study was carried out with 80 percent recycled asphalt pavements. The resulted t statistics and p-values showed that the composition of 40 percent new hot mixed asphalt with the 60 percent recycled asphalt pavement with the macro texture would lead into the highest value of skid number. Referring the current usage of 80 percent recycled asphalt pavements, it is recommended to use 60 percent contents instead.

In this study, the willingness to pay approach has been employed by using studies done in developed countries. The willingness to pay method measures the value of life in terms of values for which people are willing to pay for reducing risks threatening their lives. This study has been conducted with the aim of investigating the employment of the willingness to pay method and designing relevant questionnaires. Two usable methods, i.e., obvious preference and expressive preference are taken into account in the willingness to pay approach. From among these two methods, the obvious method is highly applicable and people's safety is questioned by using questionnaires directly or indirectly. The use of conditional valuation is a known method for estimating willingness to pay, and in this study, open-ended questionnaires were used. To this end, the number of 400 people was considered and two in-person interview and phone contact ways were employed. The findings suggested that, by summing up all items of costs along with human capital method, the economic load arising from traffic casualties in Iran was estimated to be over 4 billion dollars in 2011. By reducing the value of willingness to pay in 2013 (equivalent to 65000 dollars for each person) to that of 2010 by using the medium inflation rate, the value of this cost is estimated for 30000 dollars for each person in 2010. The overhead value of 53%based on the willingness to pay approach relative to the human capital method is much similar to the findings of international studies including infrastructure, transportation and regional economy bureau in Australia.

The study aims at developing a system (DSS) to help policy makers find out the most efficient road safety measures throughout the provinces in Iran. The system serves the purpose to support future road safety decisions based on information on the efficiency of different types of measures taken previously. More specifically، this efficiency، expressed as an index، is calculated based on historical information from previously implemented measures across different regions in Iran. The identified indicators are all linked to road safety measures contributing to the achievement of sustainable road safety. Considering the number of fatalities as the road safety outcome، an efficiency analysis can be carried out for each region to evaluate the efficiency of the measures taken in the past. To do so، inefficiency measure is calculated، defined by the proportion of fatality rates in relation to the combined measure of road safety performance indicators which should be minimized. The relative inefficiency for each region is modeled by the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique. The inefficiency rate for each DMU must be minimized by either decreased fatality indices and/or increased safety measures to an optimal extent. Using a dual model of the main DEA model for each DMU، a target setting task can be conducted by identifying the benchmarks as the best-performing entities. In a next step، a fuzzy decision making system is constructed to convert the information obtained from the DEA analysis into a rule-based system that can be used by policy makers to evaluate the expected outcomes of certain alternative investment strategies in road safety.

In this paper، analysis outputs are illustrated in two distinct stages as follows: The DEA outputs consisting of the indices that declare road safety condition in a region under study (an inverse criterion of the risk indices)، and the single relative efficiency indicator in each region which best indicates the performance revenue attributed to the implemented measures. The analysis outputs (road fatality risks) are stated regarding implementation of road safety countermeasures that their great magnitude is expected to result in less road crashes and casualties. The efficiency index depends on the level of the road safety measures applied. Estimating the relative inefficiency values among the different provinces is performed applying the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. In this research، an inefficiency index is used as a criterion to evaluate the previous performances of road safety agencies. Using a dual model of the main DEA model for each DMU، a target setting task can be conducted by identifying the benchmarks as the leading entities. Two restricting subjects and relevant solutions have been proposed. The first is the concern about efficient units or benchmarks who have not found any unit to follow as a better performing one. Somehow، the benchmarks can also find a better situation in a special analytical context. The second issue relates to the two-year data comparison in a same province and the related debates.

For making decisions in optimizing investments in road safety projects, it is required to establish a regular process for selecting the most suitable countermeasures to be provided to road safety planners and decision-makers. Using the model developed in this research, a given budget funded from the road agency may be distributed among all predetermined locations (sites or routes), considering: (1) applying the share assigned to each location, the best possible improvements are selected as the premiere strategy amongst all alternatives through which the highest benefit is resulted, and finally, the sum of net benefits for all locations is maximized, and (2) the sum of construction costs attributed to selected alternatives in all locations does not exceed the total project budget. A set of road safety measures is studied involving the items known as geometric features and road design criteria. The features defined here consists of lane width and road surface quality, roadside hazard zones, horizontal curves, crest vertical curves and narrow bridges. The cost-benefit analysis and binary integer programming methods are used to develop economic appraisal and complete optimization tasks. The Solver program (as an add-in to Excel) is the main tool to run the allocating process. The research economic appraisal and optimization process consist of eight steps within which some criteria are applied to define, valuate, discount and compare the cost and benefit components of the analysis. The most important measure to estimate the safety benefits is a mediator variable which is broadly known as Accident Modification Factor (AMF). In this research, AMFs are extracted for each geometric feature mentioned above using the current valid accident models in Iran. As a means to support the execution of the developed model, a software program contributing to running the process of resource allocation is provided.