Safety

Safety Performance and Robustness of Heavy Vehicle AVCS

Taylor, R. Jemonde
Yih, Paul
Gerdes, J. Christen
2005

Dynamically, heavy trucks are inherently different than passenger cars. In addition to the increase rollover risk arising from an elevated center of gravity height, heavy trucks possess additional failure modes such as jackknifing and excessive trailer swing. As a response to these issues, significant research has been performed in the last three decades to establish safety metrics for heavy trucks based on dynamic testing. This research has had an impact on determining acceptable size and weight restrictions for heavy vehicles and on the actual design of heavy trucks for increased safety...

Methods Of Analysis Of Ivhs Safety: Executive Summary

Hitchcock, Anthony
1992

This report presents the executive summary to a study on developing and demonstrating methods by which the safety of Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) can be assured, assessed and evaluated. Safety considerations were studied for automated freeways, driver aids and copilots. Management and policy issues are briefly discussed in conclusion.

Rest Areas – Reducing Accidents Involving Driver Fatigue

Banerjee, Ipsita
Lee, Joon ho
Jang, Kitae
Pande, Swati
Ragland, David
2010

Rest areas are a countermeasure for fatigue; what role do they play in fatigue-related freeway collisions? The present study spatially evaluates fatigue collisions. In California, of 2,203,789 highway collisions recorded between 1995 and 2005, fatigue collisions accounted for 1.3% (‘strict’ definition of fatigue) and 9.7% (‘expanded’ definition). Collisions in the vicinity of rest areas were investigated using two different approaches: 1. 10-miles up/downstream of rest areas 2. Distance traveled from rest areasSample t-tests indicated that both fatigue and non-fatigue collisions decreased...

Emergency Vehicle Maneuvers and Control Laws for Automated Highway Systems

Toy, Charmaine
Leung, Kevin
Alvarez, Luis
Horowitz, Roberto
2001

In this report control laws and maneuvers for high priority emergency vehicle transit on automated highways are presented. The work presented is specifically designed for use with the Partners for Automated Transit and Highways (PATH) hierarchical control architecture. The types of control laws that are needed for the different hierarchical layers are examined, and specific maneuvers for the coordination and link layers are presented. Simulations using SmartCAP (a mesoscopic traffic simulator) and SmartAHS (a microscopic traffic simulator) demonstrate the maneuvers' functionality.

A Specification Of An Automated Freeway With Vehicle-borne Intelligence

Hitchcock, Anthony
1992

The focus of this work is to derive a technique of safety analysis for an automated freeway system. To demonstrate the method of safety analysis a procedure called fault tree analysis is applied. The specified freeway operates with vehicles in platoons. The safety criterion used here is that two or more simultaneous faults must occur independently before the hazards can arise.

Safety and Throughput Analysis of Automated Highway Systems

Godbole, Datta N.
Lygeros, John
2000

We investigate the effect of a number of design alternatives on the safety and capacity of an Automated Highway System. Our methodology makes use of two computational tools, designed to highlight the fundamental limitations of the vehicle dynamics, sensing and control strategies and inter-vehicle communication. The first tool produces the minimum spacing necessary for two vehicles not to collide, as a function of their state and capabilities. The second tool investigates the multiple collisions that may occur in a string of vehicles if the spacing requirements of the first tool are...

A Comparative Safety Study of Limited versus Continuous Access High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Facilities

Jang, Kitae, MS
Ragland, David R., PhD
Chan, Ching-Yao, PhD
2009

The report summarizes the findings from comparative studies of safety performance between two different types of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) facilities in California - continuous access versus limited access. The findings show that HOV facilities with limited access offer no safety advantages over those with continuous access, whether measured by percentage of collisions, collisions per mile, collisions per VMT, or collision severity. As part of the present research, the authors investigated the relationship between HOV design features and safety performance of HOV facilities. One key...

Who Noticed, Who Cares? Passenger Reactions to Transit Safety Measures

Wallace, RR
Rodriguez, DA
White, C
Levine, J
1999

Safety and security are important considerations for the transit operator, but few empirical studies exist that measure the effectiveness of measures taken to improve transit safety either on actual crime (or other incident) data or transit passengers’ perceived safety. The current study focuses on the links between transit safety measures implemented in the Ann Arbor, Michigan, area; the visibility of these improvements to transit passengers; and perceived levels of safety. The findings indicate that the characteristics of passengers’ riding patterns, and whether a safety measure...

Evaluation Of The Advanced Operating System Of The Ann Arbor Transportation Authority: Passenger Reactions to Transit Safety Measures

Wallace, RR
Rodriguez, D
White, C
Levine, J
1999
Safety and security are important considerations for the transit operator, but few empirical studies exist that measure the effectiveness of measures taken to improve transit safety on either actual crime (or other incident) data or transit passengers’ perceived safety. The current study focuses on the links between transit safety measures implemented in the Ann Arbor, Michigan region, the visibility of these improvements to transit passengers, and perceived ...

SmartAHS and SHIFT Enhancements, Persistence and Query Interpretation

Misener, Jim
2000

We have enhanced and "tuned" SmartAHS and SHIFT to address a wide variety of functional and user needs. SmartAHS has become an important microsimulation tool for design, analysis and evaluation of AHS - and "pre-AHS" or AHS deployment - concepts and scenarios in dimensions of system performance (i.e., throughput and travel time), safety and comfort. The SmartAHS/Hybrid Systems Tools Interface Format (SHIFT) is the basis for SmartAHS, and it is the general hybrid systems simulator for user-defined AHS architectures.