Evaluation

Traffic collisions are a leading cause of death and injury in California and the number one cause of death for people between the ages of one and 44. High-visibility enforcement programs (HVEs) are administered nationwide by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and combine intensive enforcement of a particular traffic safety law with widespread media and public education campaigns. HVE programs have been shown to be effective in reducing alcohol-impaired driving and promoting seat belt use. A major challenge in implementing HVEs, however, exists among local police...

Better data on pedestrian volumes are needed to improve the safety, comfort, and convenience of pedestrian movement. This requires more carefully-developed methodologies for counting pedestrians as well as improved methods of modeling pedestrian volumes. This paper describes the methodology used to create a simple, pilot model of pedestrian intersection crossing volumes in Alameda County, CA. The model is based on weekly pedestrian volumes at a sample of 50 intersections with a wide variety of surrounding land uses, transportation system attributes, and neighborhood socioeconomic...

Collision data from High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) facilities with two different types of access, continuous and limited, are examined in this paper. The findings show that HOV facilities with limited access offer no safety advantages over those with a continuous access. Compared with continuous access HOV lanes, a higher percentage of collisions was concentrated on limited access HOV lanes. Limited access HOV lanes also had higher collision rates. Findings from investigating the relationship between collision rates in HOV lanes with respect to shoulder width, length of access, and the...

Weather-related crashes represent a significant concern in roadway safety. Wet collisions often resulted in injuries or fatalities, at a ratio higher than collisions that occur in dry roadway conditions. Therefore, it is of strong interest to identify and manage the locations where collisions are prone to happen under wet pavement surface or adverse weather conditions. This paper introduces a method to estimate precipitation exposure of roadway segments by linking weather station data to collision database. Subsequently, the corresponding crash rate for a subject location is...