SafeTREC

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...

Addressing Inappropriate Driver Behavior at Rail-Highway Crossings

Cooper, Douglas L.
Ragland, David R
2008

Driver behavior at rail highway crossings has been the subject of numerous studies, most of which show that violations are relatively commonplace. The focus of this paper will be on those drivers who drive around fully descended gates. Drivers commonly misjudge the speed and distance of trains. They must make a decision about the time remaining before the train arrives based on sensory signals as well as non-sensory factors such as expectations and motivation. At a gated crossing, where drivers have been alerted to the imminent danger by lowered gates, there is more to be gained by...

Estimating Pedestrian Accident Exposure: Protocol Report

Greene-Roesel, Ryan
Diogenes, Mara Chagas
Ragland, David R
2007

Walking is a healthful, environmentally benign form of travel, and is the most basic form of human mobility. Walking trips account for more than 8 percent of all trips taken in California, making walking the second most commonly used mode of travel after the personal automobile (Caltrans, 2002). In addition, many trips made by vehicle or public transit begin and end with walking. In spite of the importance and benefits of walking, pedestrians suffer a disproportionate share of the harm of traffic incidents in California. As noted above, walking trips make up just 8 percent of all trips in...

Rail Crossings: A Strategy to Select Countermeasure Improvements for Rail-Highway Crossings in California

Cooper, Douglas L.
MacLeod, Kara E.
Ragland, David R.
2007

Rail crossing crashes have declined in the past 30 years, both nationally and in California. This is largely attributed to the closing of a large number of crossings as well as the deployment of a wide range of countermeasures, including signal systems, gating and grade separation programs. However, the number of crashes and subsequent injuries and deaths is still unacceptably high. Rail crossings provide different levels of warnings from four-quadrant gates down to stop signs. To understand how the state of California can best utilize state and federal funding available through SAFETEA-LU...

Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Evaluation for the City of Emeryville at Four Intersections

Johnson, Emily S.
Ragland, David R
Cooper, Jill F
O'Connor, Terri
2005

The City of Emeryville is small in area (1.2 square miles) and population (7,000), but it is one of the most regionally connected cities in the Bay Area (California). Emeryville is situated at the eastern end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, contains the intersection of Interstate Highway 80 (I-80) with several regional and other interstate highways, and has extensive transportation access by Amtrak Rail, Alameda County (AC) Transit and heavy cargo facilities at the nearby Port of Oakland. The city has many large employers and several large shopping areas, and the daytime...

Safety Performance of High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Facilities: Evaluation of HOV Lane Configurations in California

Jang, Kitae
Chung, Koohong
Ragland, David R.
Chan, Ching-Yao
2009

Collision data from High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) facilities with two different types of access, continuous and limited, are examined in this paper. The findings show that HOV facilities with limited access offer no safety advantages over those with a continuous access. Compared with continuous access HOV lanes, a higher percentage of collisions was concentrated on limited access HOV lanes. Limited access HOV lanes also had higher collision rates. Findings from investigating the relationship between collision rates in HOV lanes with respect to shoulder width, length of access, and the...

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....

Prehospital Response Time and Traumatic Injury—A Review

Doggett, Sarah
Ragland, David R.
Felschundneff, Grace
2018

A significant proportion of fatalities from motor vehicle collisions (MVC) could be prevented through better emergency medical service (EMS) care. Despite a lack of conclusive research, there is a consensus that prehospital time (the time between the MVC and the patient’s arrival at the hospital) must be reduced as much as possible. Many studies use response time (the time between EMS dispatch and arrival at the scene) as an indicator of overall prehospital time and a metric of EMS performance. However, there are other components of prehospital time that may be equally important, including...

False Alarms and Human-Machine Warning Systems

Zabyshny, Aleksandr A
Ragland, David R
2003

This work illustrates that false alarms are likely to have significant frequencies as well as detrimental influence on the effectiveness of human-machine warning systems. Several factors are responsible for false alarm materialization, including the need to predict uncertain conditions in the future, variability of human perception, and low a priori probabilities of traffic collisions. The effect of false alarms on human trust in warning systems and on credibility of warnings could be considerable even for low false alarm rates. One way to decrease false alarm rates would be to focus on...

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...