Paul St-Aubin edited section_Conclusion_In_this_paper__.tex  about 7 years ago

Commit id: c1a0766c0a16661b76c456e6d017d29f1526d7ae

deletions | additions      

       

\section{Conclusion}  In this paper, a highly detailed international comparison of roundabout merging zone behaviour is performed aiming to explain regional discrepancies in road safety using collision course modeling and surrogate safety measures. Conclusions derived from the surrogate safety measures of: speed, yielding post-encroahcment post-encroachment  time, and time-to-collision are found to be consistent among each other as well as with observed discrepancies in national historical records of road safety after controlling for a number of road geometry, land use, traffic composition, weather and climate conditions, temporal effects, and traffic exposure factors. This leaves a latent, unobserved component of road user behaviour that might be affected by local road use norms. Whether this behaviour is shaped by collective trends in education, enforcement, or design policy, i.e. ``culture'', remains to be seen, but it seems clear that road user behaviour is shaped by more than site-specific effects. Limited historical accident data was also available at individual sites and would seem to suggest that these effects present at the selected sites are generally consistent with national historical records of road safety as well as the conclusions drawn from the studied surrogate safety measures. However, given the issues with this localised accident data set, this last observation remains, for the time being, inconclusive, prompting further investigation. In general, a more thorough statistical analysis using larger sets of localised accident data will be beneficial in further solidifying conclusions drawn from surrogate safety measures.  One other limitation of this study is that, while the sample of Québec roundabouts can be considered to be regionally representative of most of the province of Québec, the roundabouts sampled in Sweden were all located in the same city of Lund. This limitation is of greatest concerns when road user behaviour varies \textit{within} regions (such as Sweden) more than \textit{between} regions (such as between Europe and North America) as a whole. In fact, the opposite is assumed. assumed, and partially corroborated in regional speed studies \citep[e.g.][]{297b0789-4f83-4a0f-8808-8a2d5f00634b}.