Safety

Attica Tollway (Attiki Odos Motorway), the peripheral motorway of Athens metropolitan area, is the first road concession project in Greece. Attica Tollway provides safe and uninterrupted traffic flow conditions, saving more 270,000 person hours of delay per day with substantial savings in fuel consumption and air pollutant emissions. During the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, special traffic management plans were successfully implemented to ensure quick and safe access to the Olympic venues and to maintain a high level of service to all tollway users. The paper presents routine and emergency...

Agencies and practitioners often test innovative strategies for improving driver compliance with traffic regulations. However, in evaluating these strategies, researchers often rely on simple before-and-after methods that suffer from several flaws and that can result in misleading results and an inaccurate assessment of a strategy’s effectiveness. This paper examines these flaws, proposes a framework that avoids or corrects for them, and then uses it to analyze the effectiveness of a common strategy: installation of larger signage (at a freeway entrance ramp). The framework described in...

Emergency response systems in urban areas should be located to ensure adequate coverage and rapid response time. The authors develop a model for locating emergency vehicles on urban networks considering both spatial and temporal demand characteristics such as the probability that a server is not available when required. The authors also consider that service rates are not identical but may vary among servers and are dependent upon incident characteristics; corresponding districting and dispatching problems are also integrated in the location model. The model is applied using real data for...

An important perceptual task during driving is the ability to detect and avoid collisions. Failure to accurately perform this task can have serious consequences for the driver and passengers. The present research developed and tested a model of car following by human drivers, as part of a general model under development of a human driver. Unlike other car following models that are based on 3D parameters (e.g., range or distance) the present model is based on the visual information available to the driver. The model uses visual angle and change in visual angle to regulate speed during car...