1 Answers
A traffic conflict, is "an observable event which would end in an accident unless one of the involved parties slows down, changes lanes, or accelerates to avoid collision". Traffic conflicts are defined by their time-to-collision, post-encroachment-time, and angle of conflict parameters as well as the vehicles' position in time and space.
Traffic conflicts have typically been used for transportation safety studies, whereby observing and monitoring individual collisions may be impractical, unfeasible, or unsafe. Traffic conflicts are used as traffic collision surrogates, under the assumption that the same factors affecting collision rates also affect conflict rates, in proportion to the conflict severity, termed conflict hierarchy.
The principles of traffic conflicts apply to all modes of transportation involving vehicles operating in a non-guided medium, including motorized vehicles, airplanes, boats, and bicycles.