Infrastructure

Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Strategies for UC Berkeley Campus and Periphery: Recommendations for Implementation

Schneider, Robert J.
Grembek, Offer
Braughton, Mathew
Orrick, Phyllis
Ragland, David R.
2013

The high level of pedestrian, bicycle, and transit activity on city-owned streets surrounding the UC Berkeley campus creates a dynamic social environment and gives Berkeley much of its charm. But the streets around the campus (henceforth called the campus periphery) are also places where pedestrians and bicyclists have been injured or killed in collisions with automobiles. This creates liability for drivers, the City, and the University—and worse, causes suffering for crash victims and their families. Everyone has an interest in reducing the frequency and severity of pedestrian and bicycle...

Cross-Section Designs for the Safety Performance of Buffer-Separated High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes

Jang, Kitae
Kang, Sanghyeok
Seo, Jongwon
Chan, Ching-Yao
2011

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...

A Database for Active Transportation Infrastructure and Volume

Proulx, Frank R.
Zhang, Yuanyuan, PhD
Grembek, Offer, PhD
2014

Information about pedestrian infrastructure and volume is indispensable to monitoring, evaluating, and improving the environment for comfortable and safe walking. However, determining and organizing the various types of data in a way that is easy to update and analyze can present challenges. This study designed and developed a relational database for pedestrian infrastructure and volume, and comprises two core components (node table and approach table) and several sub-components (tables for crosswalks, sidewalks, buffers, signs, transits, bikeways, bicycle parking, and volumes). Important...

Ten Years Later: Examining the Long-Term Impact of the California Safe Routes to School Program

Ragland, David R
Pande, Swati
Bigham, John
Cooper, Jill F
2014

California was the first state to legislate a Safe Routes to School (SR2S) program under Assembly Bill AB 1475 (1999). SR2S funds construction projects that make it safer for children to walk/bicycle to school and encourage a greater number of children to choose these modes of travel for the school commute. The main goal of this project was to assess the long-term impact of program-funded engineering modifications on walking/bicycling levels and on safety. Evaluation of improvements was determined using a targeted method of determining the countermeasures to result in safety and mode shift...

Building a Highway Linear Referencing System from Preexisting Reference Marker Measurements for Transportation Data Management

Bigham, John
Kang, Sanghyeok
2013

To manage events associated with highways, data systems have been developed to store relevant event information. To reap the full benefits of geographic information system technologies, the relative locations can be integrated into a linear referencing system. The objective of this paper is to present a methodology for building a highway linear referencing system by applying preexisting marker measurements to a digital street network. The system was developed for locating motor vehicle collisions in California and resulted in improved accuracy compared to a previously developed system....

Evaluation of Traffic and Environment Effects on Skid Resistance in California

Oh, Soon Mi
Madanat, S M
Ragland, David R.
Chan, Ching-Yao
2010

Skid resistance is one of the important serviceability indicators related to safety on wet pavements. There is a need to manage skid resistance systematically to maintain the level of safety performance of roadway surfaces. This study focused on the development of a skid resistance deterioration model based on the analysis of skid data inventory collected in California. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has collected skid resistance data across the complete state highway network over the past two decades using a standard locked-wheel skid trailer, ASTM E-274. This...

Property Damage Crash Equivalency Factors for Solving the Crash Frequency-Severity Dilemma: Case Study on South Korean Rural Roads

Oh, Jutaek
Washington, Simon
Lee, Dongmin
2010

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...

The Marked Crosswalk Dilemma: Uncovering Some Missing Links in a 35-Year Debate

Mitman, Meghan Fehlig
Ragland, David R.
Zegeer, Charles V.
2008

Largely in response to several landmark safety studies, as an official or unofficial policy, many agencies across the U.S. have elected to remove marked crosswalks at uncontrolled intersections, or have shown resistance to installing them in the first place. This approach results in unacceptable pedestrian mobility restrictions, yet such restrictions are often not considered in policy-making. As such, there is a need for roadway system owners to develop strategic safety guidelines to address the marked crosswalk dilemma. Since 2005, the UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center, in a study funded...

The Effects of Transportation Corridor Features on Driver and Pedestrian Behavior and on Community Economic Vitality: Final Study Report

Sanders, Rebecca L. PhD
Griffin, Ashleigh MS, MCP
MacLeod, Kara E. MHP
Cooper, Jill F. MSW
Ragland, David R. PhD, MPH
2012

This report presents the results from a multiyear effort to develop and test performance measures for evaluating the impact of landscaping and roadside features on pedestrian and bicyclist safety and mobility and economic vitality for Caltrans’ urban arterial network. The first phase of the study was a literature review, and the second phase focused on developing performance measures. The third and fourth phases focused on testing the proposed performance measures consisting of an infrastructure analysis, policy review, safety analysis and a pedestrian and bicyclist intercept survey on two...

Develop a Plan to Collect Pedestrian Infrastructure and Volume Data for Future Incorporation into Caltrans Accident Surveillance and Analysis System Database

Zhang, Yuanyuan
Proulx, Frank R.
Ragland, David R.
Schneider, Robert J.
Grembek, Offer
2014

This project evaluates the feasibility of developing a pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure database and volume database for the California state highway system. While Caltrans currently maintains such data for motor vehicles in the Traffic Accident Surveillance and Analysis System - Transportation System Network (TASAS-TSN) database, the agency does not keep records on pedestrian or bicycle facilities. This information is crucial for improving the safety of these vulnerable road users. This project developed a proposed database structure and corresponding data collection methodology. It...