Road User Behavior

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...

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;...

High-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes have been deployed as a tool for traffic management in urban freeway systems to improve reliability and mobility of trips. As they are planned to traverse crowded urban areas, it is often difficult to acquire sufficient right-of-way for retrofitting HOV lanes to existing freeway systems with recommended cross-sectional design. The present study proposes a methodology to determine the optimal set of cross-sectional design for safety performance by evaluating individual impact of each design element on safety as well as tradeoffs between them. Detailed...

Bicycle passing maneuvers represent interferences between bicycle travelers and are important operational attributes of bicycle traffic. The number of bicycle passing maneuvers has been used to evaluate the level of service (LOS) of off-street bicycle facilities. The primary objectives of this paper are to propose a method to model bicycle passing maneuvers on multilane bicycle paths with heavy bicycle traffic and explore the characteristics of those passes. The authors classified bicycle passing maneuvers into free, adjacent, and delayed passes according to the lateral distance...