A Framework for the Protective Features of a Safe System

R24: Developing a Framework to Combine the Different Protective Features of a Safe System


Research Team

Principal Investigator
Offer Grembek
University of California, Berkeley


Funding Organization

Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety (CSCRS)


Summary

Transportation safety professionals strive to build a system on which no street user can be severally or fatality injured on. To accomplish such a safe system, it is necessary to effectively harness all the core protective opportunities provided by the system. Despite the increasing consensus that this needs to be thought of as a systems problem, the considerations for each of these layers of protection are siloed, and many of the protective features are evaluated in terms of potential lives saved due to a specific improvement. The proposed research will examine what happens when we no longer assume each of the individual components holds a desirable level of protection for a certain circumstance, but that they contribute to a larger joint entity (i.e., the system) that can exhibit the required characteristics or traits (i.e., safe). The conjecture here is that there is a set of protective features that can jointly fulfill the promise of a safe system.
This projects aims to:
  • Determine whether kinetic energy is indeed a desirable feature that can be quantified across the different protective mechanisms of the system (e.g., roadway, vehicle, laws).
  • Analyze levels of the selected crash magnitude proxy (e.g., kinetic energy) that road users are exposed to across different parts of the network. This will be done by mode.
  • Develop a framework to quantify the overall protective capability of the system and will be benchmarked against the desired capability of the system, as established by the policy makers.

Learn more about this project on the CSCRS website.