Challenges in Rear-end Conflict-based Safety Assessment of Highly Disordered Traffic Conditions

Surrogate safety measure (SSM)-based proactive safety assessment in developing economies like India with weak lane discipline mixed traffic conditions is limited and often lacks qualitative aspects of reliability. On further investigation, challenges of data acquisition, the viability of a specific SSM, the corresponding threshold value for the identification of conflict, and availability of reliable road crash data are observed to be the key hurdles in achieving robust results and proposing measures for mitigating rear-end conflicts and risks of crashes. The present study highlights the hurdles in performing the safety assessment for rear-end conflicts in mixed traffic conditions with weak lane discipline and proposes possible measures to overcome these hurdles.