Speed prediction models for sustainable road safety management

This paper illustrates an experimental analysis conducted in 2010 on statistically significant number of roadway sections belonging to two - lane rural roads in Northern Italy. The aim of this research is to develop operating speed prediction models on tangents and circular curves to perform roadway alignment consistency analysis for travel safety in context with current operating speeds. Acquired relationships were particularly interesting and different explanatory variables were introduced in the predictive models which are dependent on examined geometric roads features. These relationships constitute a new set of models about the operating speeds to design and verify roads geometric alignments adding to those already available in the scientific literature and, then, to plot speed profiles to illustrate complete driver speed behaviour on two-lane rural roads individualizing critical roadway sections where the speed differences, between road geometric components, are inappropriate.