Safety

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...

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...

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...

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...