Work zones in the United States have approximately 700 traffic-related fatalities, 24,000 injury crashes, and 52,000 non-injury crashes every year. Due to future highway reconstruction needs, work zones are likely to increase in number, duration, and length. This study focuses on analyzing the effect of work zone duration mainly due to its policy-sensitivity. To do so, we created a unique datas...

OBJECTIVE To investigate comparative road user crash and fatality rates in Japan between 2000 and 2010 in the elderly and young. METHODS Data from the Japan Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare Vital Statistics Database and the Institute for Traffic Accident Research and Data Analysis were used to calculate crash rates by age group, vehicle, and license category. RESULTS Fatal crash rates ...

This paper summarizes a study conducted by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) under a Cooperative Agreement between NHTSA and Meritor WABCO to examine the performance of roll stability control systems (RSC), and electronic stability control systems (ESC) for heavy truck tractor-semitrailers. The study is based on the analysis of independent crash datasets using...

Numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating crash occurrence as related to roadway design features, environmental factors and traffic conditions. However, most of the research has relied on univariate count models; that is, traffic crash counts at different levels of severity are estimated separately, which may neglect shared information in unobserved error terms, reduce efficiency in p...

Identification of highway segments with an unusually high occurrence of non-intersection crashes has been a particularly challenging problem for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, because these crashes were scattered over approximately 9,500 miles of highway. The PRÈCIS floating highway segment algorithm was developed to identify crash rates and crash densities at any given point along...

BACKGROUND It is known that experience of a previous crash is related to incidence of future crashes in a cohort of New Zealand cyclists. This paper investigated if the strength of such association differed by crash involvement propensity and by the need for medical care in the previous crash. METHODS The Taupo Bicycle Study involved 2590 adult cyclists recruited in 2006 and followed over a m...

A critical part of any risk assessment is identifying how to represent exposure to the risk involved. Recent research shows that the relationship between crash count and traffic volume is nonlinear; consequently, a simple crash rate computed as the ratio of crash count to volume is not suitable for comparing the safety of sites with different traffic volumes. To solve this problem, we describe ...

Naturalistic driving studies provide an excellent opportunity to better understand crash causality and to supplement crash observations with a much larger number of near crash events. The goal of this research is the development of a set of diagnostic procedures to define, screen, and identify crash and near crash events that can be used in enhanced safety analyses. A way to better understand c...

This study aims at 'predicting' the occurrence of lane-change related freeway crashes using the traffic surveillance data collected from a pair of dual loop detectors. The approach adopted here involves developing classification models using the historical crash data and corresponding information on real-time traffic parameters obtained from loop detectors. The historical crash and loop detecto...

Consumer crash test programs provide comparative information on the crashworthiness of new vehicles which, in turn, should predict the performance of the same vehicles in real-world crashes. However, the detail and quality of available information from tests and real-world crashes differ widely, so identifying meaningful relationships between crash test results and real-world crashworthiness ca...