Countermeasures

July 30 Webinar: Redesigning the System to Support Safety

July 26, 2021
SafeTREC's Katherine Chen to present in CSCRS Safe Systems Summer Learning Series

The Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety (CSCRS) recently launched a new Safe Systems Summer Learning Series that will be held on Fridays...

Observational Study of Cell Phone and Texting Use Among California Drivers 2012 and Comparison to 2011 Data

Cooper, Jill F.
Ragland, David R.
Ewald, Katrin
Wasserman, Lisa
Murphy, Christopher J.
2013

This methodological report describes survey research and data collection methods employed for the second Observational Survey of Cell Phone and Texting Use among California Drivers study conducted in 2012. This study was conducted by Ewald & Wasserman Research Consultants (E&W) on behalf of the California Office of Traffic Safety and the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center at University of California at Berkeley. The survey’s goal was to obtain a statewide statistically representative observational sample of California’s cell phone use behaviors, focusing on...

Teens and Driving in California: Summary of Research and Best Practices

Bui, Huong
Arnold, Lindsay S.
Cooper, Jill F.
Ragland, David R.
2006

The purpose of this guide is to present the major risk factors associated with teen driving in California and to highlight policy and program strategies that may be influential in reducing risk.

Driver Behavior at Rail Crossings: Cost-Effective Improvements to Increase Driver Safety at Public At-Grade Rail-Highway Crossings in California

Cooper, Douglas L.
Ragland, David R.
2007

This report examines conditions affecting vehicle-train collisions at rail crossings in California, and recommends effective countermeasures and implementation strategies. In doing so, the report helps meet California’s goal of efficiently utilizing state and federal funding available through SAFETEA-LU for increasing the safety at public atgrade rail-highway crossings.

Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Evaluation for the City of Emeryville at Four Intersections

Johnson, Emily S.
Ragland, David R.
Cooper, Jill F.
O'Connor, Terri
2005

The City of Emeryville is small in area (1.2 square miles) and population (7,000), but it is one of the most regionally connected cities in the Bay Area (California). Emeryville is situated at the eastern end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, contains the intersection of Interstate Highway 80 (I-80) with several regional and other interstate highways, and has extensive transportation access by Amtrak Rail, Alameda County (AC) Transit and heavy cargo facilities at the nearby Port of Oakland. The city has many large employers and several large shopping areas, and the daytime...

California Intersection Decision Support: A Systems Approach to Achieve Nationally Interoperable Solutions

Chan, Ching-Yao
Cody, Delphine
Cohn, Theodore
Dickey, Susan
Greenhouse, Dan
Mak, Tony
Marco, David
Nguyen, Khoi
Misener, James A.
Nowakowski, Christopher
Ossenbrugen, Paul
Ragland, David R.
Shladover, Steven E.
Tan, Swe-kuang
Vanderwerf, Joel
Wang, Xiqin
Zabyshny, Aleksandr
Zennaro, Marco
2005

The overall IDS research plan was constructed to realize, in slightly more than three years, the requirements, tradeoffs assessment, and technology investigations necessary to define an IDS. Toward the end of the project we will combine our understanding of the problem definition, IDS technologies and our integration experience with a standard Caltrans intersection (with advanced controller) and design a deployable IDS demonstration that can be field tested.

An Intensive Pedestrian Safety Engineering Study Using Computerized Crash Analysis

Ragland, David R.
Markowitz, Frank
MacLeod, Kara E.
2003

Over the past year, the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) conducted an intensive pedestrian-safety engineering study, the PedSafe Study. PedSafe was funded by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)*, which also funded companion studies in Las Vegas and Miami. The study was designed to analyze pedestrian injuries by zones (i.e., neighborhoods or districts) and to identify those most amenable to prevention efforts. The DPT expects to utilize the methodology and information from the PedSafe study to help shape a citywide pedestrian master plan. This paper describes the...

Intersection Decision Support Project: Taxonomy of Crossing-Path Crashes at Intersections Using GES 2000 Data

Ragland, David R.
Zabyshny, Aleksandr
2003

The Intersection Decision Support (IDS) Project is designed to reduce crossing-path (CP) crashes at intersections by providing crucial information to drivers that would help them avoid such crashes. Over the past decade, researchers have used the General Estimates System (GES, a representative sample of police-reported crashes in the US) and other data sources to develop a taxonomy of CP crashes and pre-crash scenarios as groundwork for crash-prevention efforts. The current study builds on and extends prior work by constructing a taxonomy of CP crashes using data from the 2000 GES and...

Driver/Pedestrian Understanding and Behavior at Marked and Unmarked Crosswalks

Mitman, Meghan F.
Ragland, David R.
2008

Pedestrian injuries at crosswalk locations represent a significant problem. In 2002, 22.7 percent of US pedestrians involved in collisions were in a crosswalk at the time of the collision, and over 96% of these occurred at an intersection. Almost all crosswalk collisions resulted in pedestrian injury or fatality (98.6 percent), and about one-third resulted in severe or fatal injury (National Automotive Sampling System (NASS) and General Estimates System (GES) 2002). As the owner of the California State Highway System, Caltrans is responsible for providing access to safe and...

The Continuous Risk Profile Approach for the Identification of High Collision Concentration Locations on Congested Highways

Chung, Koohong
Ragland, David R.
Madanat, Samer
Oh, Soon Mi
2009

This paper documents a new method for monitoring traffic collision data from continuous roadway facilities to detect high collision concentration locations. Many existing methods for detecting collision concentration locations require segmentation of roadways and assume traffic collision data are spatially uncorrelated, resulting in both false positives (i.e., identifying sites for safety improvements that should not have been selected) and false negatives (i.e., not identifying sites that should have been selected). The proposed method does not require segmentation of roadways;...