Experimental Evaluation of the Continuous Risk Profile (CRP) Approach to the Current Caltrans Methodology for High Collision Concentration Location Identification

This report evaluates the performance of Continuous Risk Profile (CRP) compared with the Sliding Window Method (SWM) and Peak Searching (PS) methods. These three network screening methods all require the same inputs: traffic collision data and Safety Performance Functions (SPFs), however, depending on how these input parameters are analyzed at the network screening level, the result of the analysis can vary significantly. Findings indicated that the CRP method produced far fewer false positives than SWM and PS. The false negative rates for CRP, SWM and PS were comparable. These findings indicate that by using the CRP method, California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) can significantly reduce the resources spent on investigating falsely identified locations and better utilize the resources in improving high collision concentration locations. It will also help Caltrans in reducing the backlog in Caltrans Table C.