Network screening measures explicitly account for crash severity by using which metric?

• A. Severity-weighted crash rate
• B. Total number of crashes
• C. EPDO average crash frequency with EB adjustment
• D. EB-adjusted crash severity score

Answer: (C)

In network screening, you want a measure that reflects not just how many crashes occur but how severe they are, and you want that measure to be reliable across sites with different traffic levels. The approach that does this best combines crash counts across severity levels into an average frequency (an EPDO-based measure) and then applies empirical Bayes adjustment. This yields a severity-aware estimate: crashes are effectively weighted by their severity, and the EB step stabilizes the estimate for sites with limited data, reducing the influence of random variation.

So, using an EPDO average crash frequency with EB adjustment provides a single, severity-weighted metric that is both reflective of crash severity and statistically robust for comparison across locations. The other options either ignore severity, rely on raw counts, or use a different type of severity score that doesn’t align with how network screening typically ranks sites.