PURPOSES: Climbing lanes on expressways managed by the Korea Expressway Corporation (KEC) have been hot potatoes due to conflicts between slow-moving vehicles such as trucks and other vehicles at the merging section as well as the less popularity with the slow-moving vehicles. In order to resolve such problems, KEC has altered existing climbing lanes to passing-type climbing lanes in 1999. The new type of climbing lanes showed an apparent improvement in mobility. For example, the speeds of vehicles using both climbing lane and other lanes improved a lot. However, there has been no clear evidence about improved safety. METHODS: This research effort was initiated to evaluate the safety of the new passing-type climbing lanes using the comparison-group(CG) method based on three-year-long traffic accident data sets before and after the change, respectively. RESULTS: The passing-type climbing lanes showed twice increased traffic accidents even though the traffic accidents on old type climbing lanes increased 1.1% during the same periods. In addition, in-depth study, the merging area of the passing-type climbing lanes was found out to be the weakest section where 43.8% traffic accidents out of total traffic accidents happened. It is noted that the merging area of the old type climbing showed only 25.0% traffic accidents. CONCLUSIONS : The new passing-type climbing lanes were found to be weak in terms of safety when compared with the old type climbing lanes. Especially, the merging area should be improved to reduce the risk of traffic conflicts between slow-moving vehicles and other vehicles.