Slides and recording http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2d40r5q9
Friday, Nov. 22
Presented by Dr. Kara Kockelman, University of Texas at Austin
Traffic fatalities are responsible for 1.3 million deaths annually, worldwide, and 16 percent of all Americans dying between the ages of 1-44. Crash rates and consequences can be examined from multiple perspectives, reflecting characteristics of the drivers and passengers, their vehicles, home locations and crash settings. This presentation focuses on crash risks and injury severities as a function of driver and vehicle characteristics and other factors. For example, heteroscedastic ordered probit models distinguish the effects of vehicle weight, footprint and height on the severity of injuries sustained by vehicle occupants in the US General Estimates Systems data sets (while controlling for many additional attributes). A survey of over 1,000 Americans was employed to analyze the impact of driving habits and distances, citation histories, vehicle ownership and demographics on crash histories and risk. Lastly, data on the 240 respondents who currently ride or have ridden a motorcycle allow one to analyze the relationship between rider training and riding frequency on regular helmet use and set the stage for a holistic cost-benefit analysis of motorcycling, to examine tradeoffs in safety, emissions, fuel use and vehicle costs.
Dr. Kockelman is E.P. Schoch Professor of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and a registered professional engineer, She holds a PhD, MS, & BS in civil engineering, a Masters of City Planning and a minor in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. She was named by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine as one of the world’s Top 100 Innovators under age 35 (2002), and has received the Regional Science Association International’s Hewings Award (2006), ASCE’s Harland Bartholomew Award (2007), & ASCE’s Huber Research Prize in Transportation Engineering (2010).
Dr. Kockelman is primary and co-author of over 110 papers across a variety of subjects, all of which involve transportation-related data analysis. Her primary research interests include the statistical modeling of urban systems (including models of travel behavior, trade and location choice), crash occurrence and consequences, energy and climate issues (vis-à-vis transport and land use decisions) and the economic impacts of transport policy. Dr. Kockelman has supervised research projects for the NSF, EPA, NCHRP, Texas and Oregon DOTs, Southwest University Transportation Centers program and the North Central Texas Council of Governments. She has chaired the Transportation Research Board’s Travel Survey Methods committee and serves or has served on TRB’s Statistical Methods, Economics, Land Development, and Traveler Behavior and Values committees. She is a member of the International Association of Travel Behavior Research and currently serves on the editorial boards of eight journals, including Transportation Research Part B & the Journal of Regional Science. Dr. Kockelman’s papers (as pre-prints) and curriculum vitae can be found at https://www.caee.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman/.