Data collection

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...

Pre-Intervention Assessment: UC Davis Medical Center and California Health Care Safety Net Institute Child Passenger Safety Initiative

Cooper, Jill F.
Ragland, David R.
MacLeod, Kara E.
Jameson, Wendy
2002

Proper use of child passenger safety (CPS) systems is highly effective in reducing injury and fatality in traffic crashes. While use of CPS systems is increasing, use is not universal, and there is a high level of improper use. The Child Passenger Safety Initiative is an innovative program to provide education and training in proper CPS system use to adults with children attending public hospitals and clinics. The initiative will provide education and resources to these adults. A preintervention baseline study with a sample of adults and children at four participating hospitals and clinics...

Safety and Other Impacts of Vehicle Impound Enforcement

Cooper, Douglas L.
Chira-Chavala, T.
Gillen, David
2000

This study was conducted by a team of researchers at the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Berkeley, with funding from the California Office of Traffic Safety. Ted Chira-Chavala directed the study, coordinated the write-up of the final report, and wrote many chapters. Douglas Cooper was the key researcher, who performed the literature review, worked with key personnel of Upland Police Department to acquire essential data for the evaluation, analyzed the data, and contributed significantly to all chapters. David Gillen performed all time-series analyses and...

Cost-Effectiveness of Traffic Safety Interventions in the United States

Vahidnia, Farnaz
Walsh, Julia
2002

OBJECTIVE: In order to demonstrate the results of all available studies on cost-effectiveness and traffic safety, and report them in a comparable format, we conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on the subject. Knowledge of cost-effective (CE) traffic safety programs that result in reduced motor vehicle crashes and fatalities is essential to city planners, managers, and police.

METHOD: Using a systematic approach to literature review, the relevant literature has been identified through the use of electronic databases, hand searching of journals, scanning reference lists...

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 Effects of Transportation Corridors' Roadside Design Features on User Behavior and Safety, and Their Contributions to Health, Enviornmental Quality, and Community Economic Vitality: a Literature Review

Macdonald, Elizabeth
Sanders, Rebecca
Supawanich, Paul
2008

A transportation corridor communicates many things to its users through its design elements. What it communicates can affect the travel mode a user decides to take, the speed at which a motorist decides to drive, whether a pedestrian will walk along or across a street, and whether a resident will bicycle to local shops. Design elements give visual cues to the users of transportation corridors that let them know where they are and how to behave. The vehicle lane widths, presence or absence of sidewalks, and presence or absence of buffering elements such as street trees and parked cars all...

Red-Light-Running Collision Avoidance

Grembek, Offer
Zhou, Kun
Zhang, Wei-Bin
2009

Red light running (RLR) problem has been recognized as a significant safety problem in California as well as throughout the United States. This paper follows a two step process to develop enhanced signal timing models for possible reduction of RLR. In the first step, field data are collected with one-second resolution and discrete choice models are estimated to determine the significant influencing factors of RLR; in the second step, based on the findings from the first step, T7F software package as well as custom designed programs is used to find the enhanced signal timing plans that can...

A Comparative Safety Study of Limited versus Continuous Access High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Facilities

Jang, Kitae
Ragland, David R.
Chan, Ching-Yao
2009
The report summarizes the findings from comparative studies of safety performance between two different types of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) facilities in California - continuous access versus limited access. The findings show that HOV facilities with limited access offer no safety advantages over those with continuous access, whether measured by percentage of collisions, collisions per mile, collisions per VMT, or collision severity. As part of the present research, the authors investigated the relationship...

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;...