Project Info

Project Request Date: 11/2/2017
Project Requested By: Chris Cunningham

Project Write-up

This project’s purpose was to compare crashes, particularly crashes which caused injury or death, over a five year period at four intersections along New Circle Road.  The intersection at Harrodsburg Road and New Circle was the primary intersection being examined because of its double diamond design.  New Circle Road’s intersections with Nicholasville Road, Leestown Road, and Tates Creek Road were used as controls.

The process started with acquiring data for all crashes in Fayette County Kentucky from 2011-2016 and importing them into ArcMap.  A shape file for all Fayette County roads was also used to allow easier spatial selection and visual evaluation of the points.  Distances of 1500 feet from the center of each intersection in both directions for New Circle and 800 feet from the center in both directions for each of the side roads were decided on for the study areas.  These distances were used to create 3000 feet by 1600 feet ellipses for each of the intersections.  These ellipses sufficiently covered some of the intersections in question, but ramps onto New Circle were too long on others and the search area had to be extended.  They were left in to give an equal spatial comparison to each of the intersections.  Around each intersection a polygon was drawn both to help visualize the study areas and to spatially select out the desired points from the all crashes shape file.  For easy replications of symbolization a .lyr file was made for the crash data.

After only the desired points were acquired, some extra querying was necessary to eliminate parking lot crashes that had been mis-attributed to Nicholasville Road.  Five maps were made from the data: one simultaneously comparing all injury crashes from each of the four intersections and one for each of the four intersections with and without imagery side by side on each.

Crashes for 2006 through 2010 for the same locations were added using the same selection method as above.  Old/New comparison maps were made using older imagery (2010) with the older set of crashes and newer imagery (2016) with the more recent crashes.

Images