Traffic Safety Evaluation of Future Road Lighting Systems

Abstract: While new road lighting technologies, either LED or adaptive road lighting systems, offer a wide range of unique potential benefits (mainly in terms of energy savings), it is necessary to evaluate the safety impacts of these technologies on road users. The literature survey shows that providing light on previous unlit roads has a positive effect on traffic safety. Reducing the amount of light has the opposite effect. These studies are usually conducted by using crash numbers, which makes it impossible to draw conclusions on changes in driving behaviour. Driving behaviour analyses need special approaches and indicators. Therefore indirect indicators such as speed and safety relationship, jerky driving and traffic conflict parameters are presented. The individual character of such data is difficult to deal with and limits big scale analyses. In order to have a practical example of such indicators a case study is conducted. Floating car data collected in Vienna is used to analyse travel speeds of taxi drivers at two LED test sites. A simple before-after analysis is used with data from January 2011 to May 2012 in order to examine an expected increase in speed due to a better visual performance of LED light. However the results show either no changes at all or a trend in speed reduction of 1km/h in average. Unfavourable test site locations might limit the significance of the results.