Highway improvement project selection by the joint consideration of cost‐benefit and risk criteria

Since highway improvement project selection requires screening thousands of road segments with respect to crashes for further analysis and final project selection, we provide a two‐step project selection methodology and describe an application case to demonstrate its advantages. In the first step of the proposed methodology, we will use odds against observing a given crash count, injury count, run‐off road count and so on as measures of risk and a multi‐criteria pre‐selection technique with the objective to decrease the number of prospective improvement locations. In the second step, the final project selection is accomplished based on a composite efficiency measure of estimated cost, benefit and hazard assessment (odds) under budget constraints. To demonstrate the two‐step methodology, we will analyze 4 years of accident data at 23000 locations where the final projects are selected out of several hundred of potential locations.