Abstract
Egypt is a middle-income country, belonging to the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR). Egypt used to be the worst performing EMR country, with over 45 fatalities per 100,000 population. It is considered an example case of many EMR countries in the region where there is a need for quantitative assessment of safety on its roads. The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) offers several functions to calculate safety performance (SPFs), which can estimate crash frequency on a highway network according to its geometric and traffic characteristics. The HSM was developed in the United States using road and crash data specific to its environment. Jurisdictions and other non-U.S. regions were encouraged to develop locally derived models suitable for the local characteristics of roads and crashes. The objective of this paper is to assess the suitability of using the HSM models on rural multi-lane divided highways in Egypt. The calibrated SPFs considering Egyptian road factors were compared with the actual crash events. The results showed that there was a need to develop locally derived SFPs using negative binomial models. The modeling approach and a validation procedure were presented and are applicable when developing local SPFs to compare how well the model performs to the actual data, and to HSM calibrated models. The models were created using 90% of the data and tested on the remaining 10% of the data. The study found that the results relating to driver behavior would help designers in regions other than the United States to benefit from the HSM.
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