A Simple Way to Improve Road Safety by Avoiding Dangerous Sections of the Route

A method of improving road traffic safety that implies constructing a route bypassing obstacles identified on a road map (graph) is considered on the example of Moscow, Russia. The obstacles are the edges of the road graph containing a statistically significant number of road traffic accidents (RTA). To check the routing efficiency, the indicator proposed by the authors earlier—the relative risk ratio—is used that equals the ratio of the number of RTA along the route with the obstacles taken into account to the number of RTA counted along the original route constructed without the obstacles taken into account. Avoiding obstacles is shown to help reduce the relative risk ratio by 9–31% (depending on the length of the original route) by increasing the average length of the route by 6–11% and increasing the average number of traversable vertices of the road graph by 6-28%.