Safety

Associations of Adult Physical Activity with Perceived Safety and Police-Recorded Crime: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis

Evenson, KR
Block, R
Roux, AV Diez
McGinn, AP
Wen, F
Rodriguez, Daniel
2012

Due to the inconsistent findings of prior studies, we explored the association of perceived safety and police-recorded crime measures with physical activity. The study included 818 Chicago participants of the Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis 45 to 84 years of age. Questionnaire-assessed physical activity included a) transport walking; b) leisure walking; and c) non-walking leisure activities. Perceived safety was assessed through an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Police-recorded crime was assessed through 2-year counts of selected crimes (total and outdoor incivilities,...

Associations Between Self-Efficacy and Children's Pedestrian Safety Following Training

Wells, H
Rouse, J
Johnston, A
Sisiopiku, V
Rodriguez, Daniel
Combs, T
Schwebel, DC
2015

Pedestrian injury is a leading cause of unintentional pediatric death. Hundreds of deaths related to pedestrian injuries occur every year in children under 18. Virtual reality interventions to teach children safe pedestrian behavior have shown success. Increasing self-efficacy is consistently related to the induction and maintenance of behavior change following a variety of interventions. In children, self-efficacy is associated with intervention-driven changes in health and academic behaviors. Self-efficacy is also linked to child and adolescent pedestrian engagement, with children...

Are Traffic Safety Rules and Experience Sufficient to Make Children Safe Pedestrians?

Rouse, J
Smith, R
Sessions, M
Combs, T
Rodriguez, Daniel
Sisiopiku, V
Schwebel, DC
2015

Pedestrian injury is among the top causes of death in North American children ages 5-12 (NCIPC, 2014). Research documents a wide range of factors that contribute to child pedestrian injury risk, but many contributing factors remain unknown and unevaluated. This study considered two such factors: institution of safety rules by parents and children’s experience crossing streets. We hypothesized both presence of parental rules about traffic safety and greater child pedestrian experience would be associated with safer pedestrian behavior in children.

Addressing Pedestrian Safety: A Content Analysis of Pedestrian Master Plans in North Carolina

Jones, DK
Evenson, KR
Rodriguez, Daniel
Aytur, SA
2010

To systematically examine the content of pedestrian master plans in North Carolina in order to assess whether and how these plans were designed to improve pedestrian safety. Methods: All current pedestrian master plans in North Carolina through 2008 were gathered and examined using content analysis. A safety quality index was developed to assess the thoroughness with which a plan addressed safety issues in four categories: (1) goal statement, (2) analysis of current conditions, (3) policy proposals, and (4) program proposals. Plans were also compared according to the implementation...

A Spatial Agent-Based Model for the Simulation of Adults' Daily Walking Within a City

Yang, Y
Roux, AV Diez
Auchincloss, AH
Rodriguez, Daniel
Brown, DG
2011

Environmental effects on walking behavior have received attention in recent years because of the potential for policy interventions to increase ...

A Comparison of Heat Effects on Road Injury Frequency Between Active Travelers and Motorized Transportation Users in Six Tropical and Subtropical Cities in Taiwan

Hsu, CK
Rodriguez, Daniel
2024
Road traffic injuries (RTIs) pose significant public health threats, particularly for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. While recent studies have revealed adverse impacts of heat exposure on RTI frequency among motorized road users, a research gap persists in understanding these impacts on non-motorized road users, especially in tropical regions where their vulnerability can be heightened due to differential thermal exposure, adaptive capacity, and biological sensitivity. In this study, we compared associations between high temperatures and RTIs across four different...

The Effects of Trucking Firm Financial Performance on Driver Safety

Rodrı́guez, Daniel
Rocha, M
Belzer, MH
2004

This chapter uses trucking firm-level information to address the paucity of multivariate analysis accounting for the safety effect of various types of truck driver compensation and firm financial performance. Using negative binomial regression models, we find that small firms with high liquidity are correlated with better safety performance. Likewise, small firms that devote a higher share of their revenues to labor expenses tend to have better safety outcomes. Although the dataset is limited in many ways, these associations suggest that small firms may be particularly sensitive to...

Model-Based Battery Thermal Fault Diagnostics: Algorithms, Analysis, and Experiments

Dey, Satadru
Perez, Hector E.
Moura, Scott
2019

Safety and reliability remain critical issues for lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. Out of many possible degradation modes, thermal faults constitute a significant part of critical causes that lead to battery degradation and failure. Therefore, it is extremely important to diagnose these thermal faults in real time to ensure battery safety. Motivated by this fact, we propose a partial differential equation (PDE) model-based real-time scheme in this paper for diagnosing thermal faults in Li-ion batteries. The objective of the diagnostic scheme is to detect and estimate the size of the thermal...

Distributionally Robust Budget Allocation for Earthquake Risk Mitigation in Buildings

Kavvada, Ioanna
Horvath, Arpad
Moura, Scott
2024

AbstractDestructive earthquakes are rare, high-impact, uncertain events. When they occur, the physical infrastructure is damaged, resulting in major economic losses. Risk mitigation planning aims to prevent extreme adverse effects and address tail risk; ...

Travel-time Reliability as a Measure of Service

Chen, Cong
Alexander Skabardonis
Varaiya, P
Transportation Research Board
2003

Statistics from a corridor along Interstate 5 in Los Angeles show that average travel time and travel-time variability are meaningful measures of freeway performance. Variability of travel time is an important measure of service quality for travelers. Travel time can be used to quantify the effect of incidents, and incident information can help reduce travel-time uncertainty. Predictability of travel time is a measure of the benefits of intelligent transportation systems. These measures differ from those defined in the "Highway Capacity Manual" and other aggregate measures of delay.