Risk-Aware Navigation Framework for Autonomous and Human-Driven Vehicles: Integrating Crash Probability Data for Safer Mobility

<div>This article presents a system to incorporate crash risk into navigation routing algorithms, enabling safety-aware path optimization for autonomous and human-driven vehicles alike. Current navigation systems optimize travel time or distance, while our approach adds crash probability as a routing criterion, allowing users to balance efficiency with safety. We transform disparate data sources, including traffic counts, crash reports, and road network data, into standardized risk metrics. Because traffic volume data only exist for a small subset of road segments, we develop a solution to project average daily traffic estimates to an entire road inventory using machine learning, achieving sufficient coverage for practical implementation. The framework computes exposure-normalized crash rates weighted by severity and integrates these metrics into routing cost functions compatible with existing navigation algorithms. The key strength of our solution is its scalability. In addition to the mapping data required by the navigation system, it requires only two additional data sources commonly maintained by transportation authorities: geolocated crash reports and traffic counts, enabling deployment across diverse jurisdictions. For connected and automated vehicles, the framework provides quantitative risk assessment for path planning algorithms. For conventional vehicles, it enables drivers to make informed routing choices based on safety preferences. Our empirical validation demonstrates that risk-aware routing achieves substantial safety improvements while maintaining reasonable travel times. The methodology also serves transportation agencies by systematically identifying high-risk corridors and crash patterns across road networks. By establishing a standardized approach to safety-aware navigation, this work addresses an important gap in current routing systems and contributes to the development of safer transportation infrastructure.</div>