Injury Exposure

We were glad to see discussion of the dangers of distracted driving to vulnerable road users in the article by Stimpson et al. in the November/December 2013 issue of Public Health Reports. However, we question the conclusion that pedestrian and bicyclist victims of distracted driving crashes are disproportionately nonHispanic white. This inference appears to be drawn from the results in Table 1 of the article, where the rates are calculated per one million total population, which fails to account for the different sizes of the populations of each race/ethnicity. To correctly evaluate the...

The high potential for occurrence and the negative consequences of secondary accidents make them an issue of great concern affecting freeway safety. Using accident records from a three-year period together with California interstate freeway loop data, a dynamic method for more accurate classification based on the traffic shock wave detecting method was used to identify secondary accidents. Spatio-temporal gaps between the primary and secondary accident were proven be fit via a mixture of Weibull and normal distribution. A logistic regression model was developed to investigate major factors...

The concept of crash precursor identification is gaining more practicality due to the recent advancements in Advanced Transportation Management and Information Systems. Investigating the shortcomings of the existing models, this paper proposes a new method to model the real time crash likelihood based on loop data through schematic eigenvectors. Firstly, traffic volume, occupancy and density spatiotemporal schematics in certain duration before an accident occurrence were constructed to describe the traffic flow status. Secondly, eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the spatiotemporal schematics...