Abstract Manager

Saskatchewan Ministry of Highways (Ministry) constructed Canada’s first Restricted Crossing U-Turn intersection (RCUT) on Highway 16, 15 km northwest of Saskatoon to mitigate the large number of critical conflicts and serious collisions that were occurring at this high-speed intersection. Constructed in December 2023, the RCUT has significantly improved safety performance on this section of highway.

This presentation will discuss the safety performance of the intersection that was measured during an In-Service Safety Review (ISSR) in 2018 before the RCUT was constructed and then measured again during the Post-Construction Safety Review in 2024 after the RCUT had been in operation for about six months. Before and after video conflict analysis was completed as part of these reviews.

A post-construction collision analysis typically requires three to five years of collision data and there can be lag of more than a year before collision information is available. Therefore, sufficient collision data was not available to assess the safety performance of the RCUT. The measurement of automated traffic conflicts over an extended time period was a more readily available way of measuring safety performance.

In the case of the RCUT, the identification of conflict points to measure had to be carefully thought out because the conflicts are spread out over a 1,600 m distance and they shifted from being crossing conflicts to merge and diverge conflicts.

This presentation will be of interest to anyone wanting to learn about the safety performance of RCUTS as well as those who want to learn about techniques for evaluating post-construction safety performance when conflicts become spread out.