Multi-objective traffic calming measures for roadways passing through rural communities

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of traffic calming measures from the perspectives of traffic safety performance, environmental and public health impacts and economic benefits. In order to examine their usefulness and applicability to rural roadways passing through small communities, this study applied four traffic calming measures: speed humps, speed tables, raised intersections and roadway narrowings. A driving simulator was used to accurately record driver deceleration, acceleration and lateral offset behavior in built roadway environments, with and without traffic calming measures present. In addition, a vehicle emissions model was used to evaluate the environmental and public health impacts. Furthermore, the cost of each traffic calming measure and the average safety benefit were considered as a function of effectiveness to determine which measures to install. The experimental results show that the most effective treatments were a combination of roadway narrowing and speed tables, except in terms of vehicle emissions.