Road Traffic Safety
Figure 1. MoDOT AFAD and its CMS signs.
Flaggers are professionally trained to guide and direct vehicles through work zones, and they are often located closest to the oncoming traffic. Discovering ways to protect flaggers is an important issue in work-zone safety. One countermeasure that can be applied when there is a one-lane closure on...
Image: Arizona DOT
The Arizona Department of Transportation’s (ADOT) thermal camera-based wrong-way vehicle detection system along I-17 in Phoenix alerted authorities and other motorists to a pickup truck traveling the wrong way on the freeway early Monday morning.
No one was hurt as the vehicle traveled southbound...
At 1:11 a.m. following the 2018 Fourth of July celebration, a vehicle traveled southbound in the northbound lanes of north Phoenix’s I-17 at Union Hills Road.
Immediately, the wrong-way driver detection system installed earlier in the year set off a system alarm. A loud horn went off in the...
Camera setups such as this have been in place on select high-rise rooftops along the test corridor since 2002, collecting data all the while.
On a rough stretch of what is “commonly” known as the I-94 Commons—for the fact that at this particular location I-94 threads in with I-35, both interstates sharing a common series of lanes—a project has been ongoing since 2002 to gather traffic movement data in an effort to, ultimately, create...
Reduced visibility conditions such as fog represent a challenging environment for drivers.
Fog reduces visibility and contrast in the visual field, which can negatively affect the perception of depth and speed. When these crucial driving cues are obscured, a driver’s ability to judge appropriate...
Image: Minnesota DOT
The Minnesota Department of Transportation's (MnDOT) Safety Innovation Team is introducing an LED lighted plow marker for winter maintenance activities in the state in order to reduce the number of motorist collisions with the department's snowplows.
In the winter of 2017-18, there were 84...
Image: Uber Blog
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) has approved the continued testing of Uber's self-driving vehicles in autonomous mode in Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas for the first time since March of this year.
An Associated Press report indicates the ride-sharing company has been...
Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) efforts that have improved safety on a busy stretch of westbound U.S. 60 in Tempe and advanced a first-in-the-nation system that reduces the risk from wrong-way drivers have been honored by the National Operations Center of Excellence.
The organization...
New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) Acting Commissioner Paul A. Karas announced that construction is underway on two projects in the Hudson Valley. The first project will install intelligent transportation system (ITS) equipment on roadways in the Hudson Valley, while the second...
A partnership between area public safety agencies and startup technology firm Waycare has led to increased safety on a stretch of I-15, the busiest roadway in Las Vegas.
The yearlong crash prevention pilot program between Waycare, a provider of artificial intelligence-based mobility products and...
The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) installed an adaptive signal timing system this past summer in Pima County to improve traffic flow on S.R. 77 (Oracle Road), the primary north-south route connecting Tucson and Oro Valley, which handles about 60,000 vehicles per day.
Thus far,...
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently announced their top 10 most-cited safety violations list for fiscal year 2018.
The list covers violations that OSHA issued between Oct. 1, 2017 through Sept. 30, 2018, but the data is preliminary. Patrick Kapust, deputy director of...
San Francisco-based Zendrive, an analytics firm, conducted a study dubbed the 2018 Distracted Driving Snapshot, which surveyed 7.1 billion miles and 4.5 million drivers from December 2017 through February 2018.
The study found that more than 60% of drivers—roughly 69 million—use their phones at...
Image source: NTSB website
Data accumulated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and released this week by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has found that of the 38,958 people who died in transportation-related accidents in calendar 2017, 95% or 37,133 were the result of highway...
Image: Florida State University
Innovative traffic safety research from Florida State University (FSU), incorporating a fascinating mix of engineering and psychology, is being deployed on highways to save lives by targeting a deadly problem: wrong-way driving crashes.
Nationwide, wrong-way crashes kill about 350 people a year...
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) last week said it was moving to allow advanced headlights known as “adaptive driving beams” to be used in vehicles on U.S. roads that could help prevent nighttime crashes.
The agency said it was acting in response to a petition filed...
The Mobileye collision-avoidance system was found to be 96% accurate for alerts warning of potential collisions. Photos courtesy of Mobileye.
Imagine that you are a bus driver in today’s urban environment. You are surrounded by rushed and distracted drivers and pedestrians, cyclists riding in your blind spots, delivery trucks stopping suddenly in front of you, and challenging weather resulting in treacherous road conditions. At the same...
There are approximately 212,000 at-grade railroad crossings in the U.S., usually consisting of one or more railroad tracks crossing a public highway. In some cases, and increasingly commonly, there is an additional presence of a multi-use path or trail, which adds a new level of complexity to...
In 2017, the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) opened its first Flex Route along U.S. 23 in Washtenaw and Livingston counties. For years, the problems of peak-hour directional traffic, incident management, and corridor operations and safety eluded the department. All short-term solutions...
Intersections offer a challenge to traffic safety professionals across the country because a third of all fatal crashes occur at intersections. This is primarily caused by right-angle crashes that result from a driver failing to recognize the hazard of oncoming traffic or misjudging the distance or...
