Traffic safety analysis based on collision data has suffered from the limited availability and relatively poor quality of collision data as well as the long collection period. The use of surrogate safety measures such as the traffic conflict technique (TCT) has been advocated as a proactive and complementary approach to study road safety from a broader perspective than relying on collision-based analysis.

The surrogate safety measures provide a better understanding of collision contributing factors and the failure mechanism that leads to road collisions. In addition, surrogate safety measures are more frequent than road collisions and are of marginal social cost. More importantly, the use of surrogate safety measures in traffic safety analysis avoids the ethical dilemma of waiting for crashes to happen in order to prevent them. This interest is supported by recent advanced technologies such as the use of computer vision, radar, or LiDAR techniques to analyze trajectory data and automatically identify conflicts as well as the use of microsimulation models for estimating surrogate indicators from simulated road user trajectories. Several issues were raised on the use of surrogate safety measures in safety analysis, such as the threshold issue of the surrogate measures, and the validation of the surrogate measures.

This Special Issue aims to present recent research on the use of surrogate safety measures in traffic safety analysis. High quality original research and review articles are welcome. All aspects of statistical analysis, machine learning, traffic simulation, and driving simulator experiments are of interest.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Development of novel surrogate safety measures
• Application of surrogate safety measures in safety evaluation and analysis
• Research on safety performance function using surrogate safety measures
• Before-after safety study using traffic conflicts
• Surrogate safety measures from traffic simulation
• Statistical modelling of traffic conflicts
• Validation of the use of surrogate safety measures for collision prevention
• Comparison between collision analysis and traffic conflicts analysis
• Surrogate safety measures of pedestrians and cyclists
• Application of surrogate safety measures for connected and autonomous vehicles