Navid Nadimi - Faculty of Engineering, Shahid Bahonar University, Kerman, Iran
Seyed Saber Naser Alavi - Faculty of Engineering, Shahid Bahonar University, Kerman, Iran
Amir Hossein Zare Mirhosseini - Faculty of Engineering, Shahid Bahonar University, Kerman, Iran
Amir Mohammadian Amiri - Safe Transportation Research & Education Center, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States

Traffic safety, like many issues in transportation system, is affected by several factors. In Iran, usually the focus has been on the infrastructure engineering and it has been assumed that the crash rate can be reduced with only physical adjustments. Identifying and eliminating hotspots in recent years has been considered by the transport experts. However, effective criteria such as accident history, severity of the accident, traffic conditions for each point and etc. are not considered in the incident index. In this study, models are proposed for ranking the hotspots. Also, the criteria for considering a point as a hotspot and weight of each criterion are determined. To define the criteria for hotspots, statistical models are applied and multi-criteria decision making methods (TOPSIS) are implemented fordeveloping the ranking model. Also, several points of the Iranshahr-Chabahar road were studied as a case study and the results of the proposed model were compared with the results of the model used by Iran road maintenance and transportation organization (RMTO). As would be observed, there is no significant difference between the results, which indicates that accident frequency plays a major role in both models

Hotspot, Decision-making, Multi-criteria, Traffic safety