Denis Morin

Safety of motorway lighting

The safety aspects of motorway lighting and its capacity to prevent nighttime accidents are examined. The analysis is based on a night/day accident rate ratio method to compare the safety benefits of two alternatives to dark motorways: continuous lighting and interchange lighting alone. Various sources of data are used to calculate night/day accident rate ratios, such as traffic volume records, accident databases, and field surveys. Three categories of accidents have been used: fatal and injury accidents, property damage only, and all accidents. The results are similar to those from recent literature. Continuous lighting reduces the overall accident rate by 33 percent (p < .001) in comparison with interchange lighting alone and by 49 percent (p < .05) compared with dark motorways. Furthermore, a breakdown by categories of average daily traffic for these comparisons reveals that accident reductions are still valid regardless of traffic flow.

Standard and Nonstandard Roadway Lighting Compared with Darkness at Rural Intersections

This report evaluates the Safety aspects of roadway lighting at rural and near-urban three-way and four-way junctions by comparing unlit intersections with those lit with two different types of lighting: (a) standard intersection lighting provided by the Ministere des Transports du Quebec, Canada, and (b) nonstandard lighting provided by the local municipalities. A night-day accident rate ratio was used to estimate the accident rate reduction for three categories of severity: fatal and personal injury accidents, property damage only accidents, and all accidents. Sites were selected with two sampling modes. The objective mode selected sites according to the accident thresholds, and the arbitrary mode Systematically selected all sites with standard lighting. The night-day accident rate ratio was measured for 376 sites by dividing the annual average number of accidents (6,546) with an annual average traffic flow (760 billion vehicles), calculated for both night and day. The accident rate reduction, expressed...

Efficacité du pré-signalement d'arrêt scolaire avec feux jaunes et avec feux de détresse

The pre-stop warning is activated by the bus drivers to warn motorists that the school bus will soon stop, requiring all vehicles to stop. On buses equipped with an eight-light system, four yellow ...