Analysis of the Relation between Highway Horizontal Curve and Traffic Safety

Abstract

Road traffic safety is a complex problem which involves many factors as human, vehicle, road and environment and so on. For the road factor, the horizontal alignment can not be ignored, especially the horizontal curve. Although the accident rate happened on curve is higher than the straight line, it is inevitable to design horizontal curve. As the traffic accident becomes serious gradually, the paper analyzes the relation between road horizontal alignment and traffic safety based on investigation, in the horizontal alignment design, the curve radius, super-elevation, widen, transition curve and sight distance have the important effect for traffic accidents, summarizes the importance of the geometric design elements which improves safety and the consistency of each element. At last the paper puts forward some advice for highway horizontal curve design.