Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
5  The overall objective of this project was to provide guidelines for the development and appli- cation of CMFs. This was accomplished through three objectives. ⢠Objective 1. Develop guidelines for calibrating current CMFs to assess treatment effective- ness at sites for which key site characteristics may be different. ⢠Objective 2. Develop guidelines for combining existing and future CMFs in a single location with multiple treatments. ⢠Objective 3. Develop recommended procedures for formulating and calibrating future CMFs that identify key influential site characteristics. Each of these objectives addressed a specific issue related to applying or developing CMFs. The approach to this project was structured accordingly. Tasks 2 through 4 were structured to address each of these objectives individually. The task structure outlined below reflects this approach. ⢠Task 1 included all the activities related to meetings with the project panel, both interim and final meetings, and presentations to two meetings of professional organizations. ⢠Task 2 addressed Objective 1, guidelines for calibrating current CMFs to assess treatment effec- tiveness at sites for which key site characteristics may be different. The primary audience for these guidelines is transportation professionals who use CMFs developed in other geographic areas to estimate the safety effects of contemplated countermeasures in their own jurisdictions. ⢠Task 3 addressed Objective 2, guidelines for how existing and future CMFs can be combined in a single location with multiple treatments. The primary audience for these guidelines is transportation professionals who consider the safety effects that would result from the appli- cation of multiple safety treatments at a location. ⢠Task 4 addressed Objective 3, recommended procedures for formulating and calibrating future CMFs that identify key influential site characteristics. The primary audience for these guidelines is highway safety researchers who must adopt new procedures to ensure that CMFs can be transferred to another location and combined with other CMFs in a usable but accu- rate manner. Note: The abbreviation CMF is used throughout this project. Although many agencies still use CRF (crash reduction factor), CMF has become the common term in the highway safety field both domestically (with the HSM) and internationally. Unless otherwise specified, CMF is a general term that represents both crash modification factors and functions. Specific sections of this report focus on factors or functions, and there is clarification to designate the meaning. C H A P T E R  2 Research Approach
