Highway Geometric Designs and Safety

Dear Colleagues,

Transportation infrastructure facilities are essential in nations’ economic progress while adding significant value to human civilization. All nations have made significant investments in constructing and expanding their transportation infrastructures in the last two decades. Typically, a transportation system consists of various components anticipated to provide improved mobility, safety, and accessibility in meeting demands. For different functional classes of roads and traffic conditions, the philosophy of geometric design would be substantially different. Highway geometric design contemplates vehicle dimensions, user characteristics, terrain, highway classification, design speed, horizontal and vertical curves, grades, 3D alignments, and sight distance. Improving geometric design to promote safety is an acute and high-priority issue.

Several approaches to improve geometric design and safety have emerged. First, design consistency is considered one of the most effective engineering measures for improving safety, particularly for identifying black spots. Consistent highway design ensures that successive geometric elements act in a coordinated way to produce harmonized driver performance. Second, innovative and sensible highway design requires robust safety performance and crash modification factors. Third, knowledge of human factors and drivers' perception is significant in improving road safety. Driver behavior can be very complex at signalized and unsignalized intersections, including roundabouts. Fourth, surrogate safety measures have been developed as a proactive step to predict possible conflicts as a function of vehicle–infrastructure interactions. This approach requires advanced data collection methods involving sophisticated equipment, coupled with suitable modeling techniques and empirical observations. Finally, the emerging autonomous vehicles would require modifications to geometric design to improve safety for both autonomous and human-driven vehicles.

This Special Issue focuses on “Highway Geometric Design and Safety”. Researchers from academia and industry are invited to submit original research articles on the following areas:

• Geometric design consistency and safety;
• Reliability analysis of geometric design;
• Highway geometric design for autonomous vehicles;
• Driver behavior at different geometric elements;
• Human factors and implications for geometric design;
• Driving simulators studies;
• Highway visibility evaluation using Lidar;
• Advances in crash risk estimation;
• Safety performance functions and crash modification factors;
• Naturalistic driver behavior;
• Computer-aided geometric design;
• Roadside design and safety;
• Other topics related to the SI theme.

The Special Issue aims at publishing high-quality papers, particularly those that address engineering and scientific aspects related to the above topics.

Dr. Shriniwas Shrikant Arkatkar
Dr. Said Easa
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Designs is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• geometric design consistency and safety
• reliability analysis of geometric design
• highway geometric design for autonomous vehicles
• driver behavior at different geometric elements
• human factors and implications for geometric design
• driving simulators studies
• highway visibility evaluation using Lidar
• advances in crash risk estimation
• safety performance functions and crash modification factors
• naturalistic driver behavior
• computer-aided geometric design
• roadside design and safety