Safety

California’s Freeway Service Patrol Program: Management Information Systems Annual Report Fiscal Year 2015-2106

Mauch, Michael
Skabardonis, Alex
2017

The Freeway Service Patrol (FSP) is an incident management program implemented by Caltrans, the California Highway Patrol and local partner agencies to quickly detect and assist disabled vehicles and reduce non-recurring congestion along the freeway during peak commute hours. The first FSP program was piloted in Los Angeles, and was later expanded to other regions by state legislation in 1991. As of June 2016, there were fourteen participating FSP Programs operating in California, deploying over 340 tow trucks and covering over 1,800 (center-line) miles of congested California freeways....

California’s Freeway Service Patrol Program: Management Information System Annual Report Fiscal Year 2017-18

Mauch, Michael
Skabardonis, Alex
2019

The Freeway Service Patrol (FSP) is an incident management program implemented by Caltrans, the California Highway Patrol and local partner agencies to quickly detect and assist disabled vehicles and reduce non-recurring congestion along the freeway during peak commute hours. The first FSP program was piloted in Los Angeles, and was later expanded to other regions by state legislation in 1991. As of June 2018, there were fourteen participating FSP Programs operating in California, deploying 318 tow trucks and covering over 1,725 (center-line) miles of congested California freeways. The...

A Safe System Approach to Pedestrian High Injury Network Development in Oakland, California

Chen, Angie
2024

As jurisdictions update their High Injury Networks, discrepancies between the initial and updated HINs are to be expected. However, this lack of stability and consistency can negatively impact the prioritization of limited resources. In order to mitigate known issues with crash data underreporting and statistical biases, I examined strategies for utilizing data on underlying roadway characteristics to augment traditional collision analysis. Using the City of Oakland as a case study city, I assessed the stability of the pedestrian High Injury Network across two consecutive five-year periods...

Development of Fast-Time Simulation Techniques to Model Safety Issues in the National Airspace System

Abkin, Michael H.
Gilgur, Alexander
Bobick, John C.
Hansman, R. John
Reynolds, Tom G.
Vigeant-Langlois, Laurence
Hansen, Mark
Gosling, Geoffrey D.
Baumgardner, William F.
2002

This report constitutes the final report for Calendar Year 2001 (CY01) under Contract Number NAS2-99072 for the third year of a three-year research project entitled “Development of Fast-Time Simulation Techniques to Model Safety Issues in the National Airspace System.” The objective of this research is to investigate and develop techniques to enable NAS fast-time simulation modeling to be useful for conducting safety analysis. The research efforts focus on examining the type of safety issues that could be appropriately modeled by fast-time simulations and developing, testing, and...

Integrating Traffic Network Analysis and Communication Network Analysis at a Regional Scale to Support More Efficient Evacuation in Response to a Wildfire Event

Soga, Kenichi
Comfort, Louise
Zhao, Bingyu
Lorusso, Paola
Soysal, Sena
2021

As demonstrated by the Camp Fire evacuation, communications (city-to-city, city-to-residents) play important roles in coordinating traffic operations and safeguarding region-wide evacuation processes in wildfire events. This collaborative report across multiple domains (fire, communication and traffic), documents a series of simulations and findings of the wildfire evacuation process for resource-strapped towns in Northern California. It consists of: (1) meteorological and vegetation-status dependent fire spread simulation (cellular automata model); (2) agency-level and agency-to-residents...

Current State of the Sharing Economy and Evacuations: Lessons from California

Wong, Stephen
Shaheen, Susan, PhD
2019

In many evacuations including wildfire evacuations, public agencies often do not have enough resources to evacuate and shelter all citizens. Consequently, we propose that the sharing economy, through private companies and/or private citizens, could be leveraged in disasters for transportation and sheltering resources. To assess this feasibility, we distributed surveys to individuals impacted by three major wildfires in California: 1) the 2017 October Northern California Wildfires (n=79), 2) the 2017 December Southern California Wildfires (n=226), and 3) the 2018 Carr Wildfire (n=284)....

California’s Freeway Service Patrol Program: Management Information System Annual Report Fiscal Year 2019-20

Mauch, Michael
Skabardonis, Alex
2021

The Freeway Service Patrol (FSP) is an incident management program implemented by Caltrans, the California Highway Patrol and local partner agencies to quickly detect and assist disabled vehicles and reduce non-recurring congestion along the freeway during peak commute hours. The first FSP program was piloted in Los Angeles, and was later expanded to other regions by state legislation in 1991. As of June 2019, there were fourteen participating FSP Programs operating in California, deploying 338 tow trucks and covering over 1,806 (centerline) miles of congested California freeways. The...

Wildfire Evacuation Planning Can Be Greatly Enhanced by Considering Fire Progression, Communication Systems, and Other Dynamic Factors

Soga, Kenichi, PhD
Comfort, Louise, PhD
Zhao, Bingyu, PhD
Lorusso, Paola, MSc
Soysal, sena
2021

Wildfires have become a perpetual crisis for communities across California. For life-threatening wildfires, mass evacuation often becomes the only viable option to protect lives. Yet, looking back at recent events, including the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, there are significant challenges associated with the evacuation process, such as multi-agency coordination, agency-resident communication, and management of extraordinarily high amounts of traffic within a short period of time. Currently, emergency planners use evacuation models that are typically based on existing...

Leveraging the Sharing Economy to Expand Shelter and Transportation Resources in California Evacuations

Wong, Stephen
Shaheen, Susan
2019

In 2017 and 2018, California was severely impacted by a number of devastating wildfires that required thousands of people to evacuate. These evacuations were hampered by poor communication, traffic congestion, and transportation and shelter resource deficiencies. To ensure that all citizens have both transportation and shelter in evacuations, agencies must consider alternative strategies for expanding resources, such as leveraging the sharing economy. To understand the possibility of leveraging the sharing economy to provide housing and transportation in an evacuation, researchers at the...

Mobility Challenges Facing Older Adults: A Contra Costa County Case Study

Ragland, David R.
McMillan, Tracy
Doggett, Sarah
2019

Meeting the mobility needs of an aging population is one of the most substantial challenges facing California in the coming decades. The number of residents age 60 and above will grow to 13.9 million by 2050, representing over 25% of the state’s population. Meanwhile, the number of residents age 85 and above is expected to increase by over 70% between 2010 and 2030. Many older adults, who have primarily been auto dependent, will reduce or stop driving due to medical and non-medical reasons. Declines in age-related physical functions may also reduce the ability to walk to access goods and...