Researchers
About the research
Crashes and increasing congestion resulting in delay, injury, loss of life, and property damage continue to characterize the nation?s highway system. One increasingly popular approach to address safety is access management. Other research in Iowa shows that access management projects led to an average 40 percent reduction in accident rates on case study routes in urban areas. However, no method currently exists to systematically identify locations with poor access management. This study tested a method to both qualitatively and quantitatively identify locations with a large number of access related crashes. Aerial imagery was used to identify locations with potential for access-related crashes. Results indicated that imagery could be used to identify locations in general but that specific features, such as median type or length, could not be accurately identified in anything but high-resolution images.