PURPOSES: The objective of this study is to analyze factors affecting traffic accident severity for determining countermeasures on freeway climbing lanes. METHODS : In this study, an ordered probit model, which is a widely used discrete choice model for categorizing crash severity, was employed. RESULTS: Results suggest that factors affecting traffic accident severity on climbing lanes include speed, drowsy driving, grade of uphill 3%, gender (male offender and male victim), and cloud weather. CONCLUSIONS : Several countermeasures are proposed for improving traffic safety on freeway climbing lanes based on the analysis of crash severity. More extensive analysis with a larger data set and various modeling techniques are required for generalizing the results.

PURPOSES : This study estimated an asphalt pavement internal behavior under uphill lanes considering reducing speed of heavy truck on uphill slope. METHODS : Truck performance curve which has been adapted to "Korea Highway Capacity Manual" was analyzed. And asphalt pavement internal behaviors were estimated with Multi-layered elastic analysis using KPRP(Korea Pavement Research Program) dynamic modulus prediction equations. RESULTS : As a result, it is shown that when the standard truck drives 2.0 km at a speed of 80 km/h in 8% climbing slope, it's speed reduced to 25.4 km/h, at same time frequency in asphalt layer decrease to 67.2% and it's dynamic modulus degrades to 30.9%. Based on these results, internal behavior as decreasing vehicle speed on uphill lanes were estimated. CONCLUSIONS : From the results of Multi-layered elastic analysis, internal behavior showed that when the standard truck drives 2.0 km at a speed of 80 km/h in 8% slope on uphill lanes, vertical strain was increased to 44.4% at the bottom of surface course, and lateral tensile strain was increased to 20.5% at the bottom of base course.

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.