Road User Behavior

SafeTREC's Liza Lutzker to present at 2025 SER Annual Meeting

May 29, 2025
Submitted by Lisa Peterson

UC Berkeley SafeTREC research data analyst Liza Lutzker will be presenting "Trends and disparities in pedestrian injuries and fatalities in hit-and-run crashes" in a poster session at the 2025 Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER) Annual Meeting on June 11th, 2025 in Boston, Massachusetts. This presentation draws from a current research project for the Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety (CPBS) that is examining recent trends and risk factors in pedestrian fatalities and injuries in hit-and-run...

CPBS 5/14 webinar: "When driving is not an option: Community access for nondrivers"

May 13, 2025
Submitted by Karen Nguyen Vo
People walking and biking in a crosswalk with "Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety" in dark teal on a white background below Join the conversation with CPBS about improving transportation systems for nondrivers

Join our consortium partners at the Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety (CPBS) and guest speakers on Wednesday, May 14 at 11am PST to discuss how the mobility needs of nondrivers...

Sites chosen for 2025 Complete Streets Safety Assessments program

April 21, 2025
Submitted by Karen Nguyen Vo

UC Berkeley SafeTREC and California Walks are excited to share news about the communities throughout California that we will be partnering with this year as part of our 2025 Complete Streets Safety Assessment (CSSA) program!

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Watch as traffic safety research is explained in 101 seconds

May 6, 2025
By Sean Patrick Farrell

There’s a statistic that sticks in the minds of many who work on traffic safety issues: The U.S., among wealthy nations, has the highest rate of road traffic fatalities. People in the U.S. are nearly three times more likely to die in a car crash than people in Australia, and six times more likely than in Sweden.

For Julia Griswold, this troubling fact should be front of mind for everyone, whether they are drivers, cyclists, pedestrians or transportation planners. Griswold runs UC Berkeley’s...

CPBS 4/23 webinar: What's new in the NACTO and AASHTO bike guide updates?

April 16, 2025
Submitted by Karen Nguyen Vo
People walking and biking in a crosswalk with "Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety" in dark teal on a white background below Join the conversation with CPBS about the latest NACTO and AASHTO bike guides

Join our consortium partners at the Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety (CPBS) and guest speakers on Wednesday, April 23 at...

The 2025 CPBSP: Partnering with 13 communities throughout California for safer walking, biking and rolling

March 24, 2025
Submitted by Lisa Peterson

UC Berkeley SafeTREC and California Walks are excited to share news about the communities throughout California that we will be partnering with this year as part of our 2025 Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Program (CPBSP)!

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CPBS 3/26 webinar: Edge lane roads - U.S. experience and future directions

March 24, 2025
Submitted by Lisa Peterson
People walking and biking in a crosswalk with "Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety" in dark teal on a white background below Join the conversation with CPBS about the safety benefits of ELRs

Join our consortium partners at the Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety (CPBS) and guest speakers on Wednesday, March 26 at 11am PST...

A Multidimensional Clustering Algorithm for Studying Fatal Road Crashes

Fishbain, Barak
Grembek, Offer
2014

Road fatalities are rare outcomes of events that occur in a small time-space region. Although the exact chain of events for each fatality is unique, there are inherent similarities between road fatalities. The science of road safety is dedicated to identifying such similarities, mainly using statistical analysis tools. Researchers typically analyze patterns that emerge over space, such as hot-spot studies, or patterns that emerge over time, such as before-after studies. Traffic research enumerates 84 parameters that characterize a road fatality. A vast number of papers have tried to...

Reflections on the 2019 Safe Systems Summit: Redefining Transportation Safety

June 7, 2019
SUBMITTED BY LISA PETERSON

According to the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there were 37,133 traffic fatalities on U.S. roadways in 2017, a 1.8-percent decrease from the 37,806 people killed in 2016. While there has been a general downward trend downward in traffic fatalities overall, this is still an alarmingly high number of deaths – and there have been troubling increases for vulnerable road users like pedestrians. A new report from the Governors Highway Safety...

Evaluation of Wet Weather Accident Causation Criteria

Oh, Soonmi
Ragland, David R.
Chan, Ching-Yao
2008

This report documents findings from analysis of traffic collision data from sites that display high collision rates only under wet pavement conditions. These sites were selected using Caltrans safety engineers’ field reports, Wet Table C “investigation required” locations, and a new approach called Continuous Risk Profile (CRP). The geometric features at the sites were studied via field visits and review of as-built plans. Rapid spatial changes (i.e., vertical and horizontal curve in short distance), narrower lane width, lack of median, and wider total freeway width were some of the...