Motorized Vehicle Safety

The objective of the study described in this paper is to identify common site features that may contribute to high collision rates under wet pavement conditions. To minimize falsely identified high collision concentration locations (HCCL) in evaluating factors contributing to high collision rate, this study accessed the magnitude of false positives (i.e., identifying sites for safety improvements that should not have been selected) by comparing HCCLs identified by the existing conventional sliding moving window approach with the ones identified by the Continuous Risk Profile (CRP)...

Safety interventions (e.g. median barriers, photo enforcement) and road features (e.g. median type and width) can influence crash severities, crash frequencies, or both. Both dimensions—crash frequency and crash severity—are needed to obtain a full accounting of road safety. Extensive literature and common sense both dictate that all crashes are not ‘created’ equal—with fatalities costing society more than 1000 times the cost of property damage only crashes. Despite this glowing disparity, the profession has not unanimously embraced or successfully defended a non-arbitrary severity...

Freeway collisions are thought to be affected by traffic states. To reduce the number of collisions, the study to reveal how the traffic states influence collisions are required. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to suggest a method to relate traffic states to collision frequency in freeway. We first defined section- based traffic phases showing traffic state of a section using upstream and downstream traffic states: free flow (FF), back of queue (BQ), bottleneck front (BN) and congestion (CT). Secondly, by integrating freeway collision data and traffic data from the California PeMS...

The only way to absolutely prevent all drivers from going around lowered gates at level rail-highway crossings is to make it physically impossible, or at least very difficult, for them to do so. While there are various options to accomplish this (constructing a separation of grade, closing the crossing, or deploying an impenetrable concrete barrier), most have high monetary or social costs. Alternative approaches—such as channelization devices and long-arm gates—while not 100 percent effective, can be used to prevent deaths and injuries while remaining economically feasible. Research...