MARTS: A New Method for Assessing Road Tunnel Safety

Road tunnels represent a critical aspect of road network safety, since crashes occurring in road tunnels usually lead to severe consequences. For this reason, road managers struggle in defining strategies to effectively evaluate tunnels’ safety levels and to identify potentially dangerous sections with the goal to intervene and counteract them. This study aims to propose a new method to assess the highway tunnel safety of the Trans-European Transport Network. Based on the analysis of the existing approaches, the main advantages and drawbacks of the traditionally adopted methods are identified. On this basis, the Method for Assessing Road Tunnel Safety (MARTS) is developed by selecting the most appropriate indicators from the literature and integrating them into a comprehensive method. The MARTS method applies Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) which allows us to reach a global indicator of attention for each analyzed tunnel, while the relative importance of the selected indicators is determined by means of an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The newly proposed method is then applied to a real case study in order to assess its sensitivity and accuracy in evaluating the potential safety benefits arising from an intervention.