Safety

Fiscal constraints placed upon governmental agencies tasked with providing
public services  are routinely under pressure to improve their efficiency, often with
reduction of available resources. The need to streamline operations, while improving
service delivery, is readily apparent in the area of incident management and highway
operations. Historically, these services are provided by transportation and public safety
agencies, whose collaboration has been minimal at best. Their missions, although parallel,
rarely have been allowed to intersect, as each discipline maintained parochial attitudes
about planning, budgeting, communications and response.  
Successful integration of services requires philosophical changes at multiple
organizational levels within agencies of each discipline. This represents the most
significant challenge to realization of the technological and strategic potential for
improved services that exist today. Many of these comprehensive organizational changes
are stimulated by grassroots efforts at the operational levels of regional agency staff.  
Transportation agencies have been braced by the skyrocketing costs of building
and maintaining roadways which are operating at or above capacity, while highway law
enforcement must balance the need to respond to, thoroughly investigate and clear
incidents efficiently with a minimal impact to the motoring public. Each of these entities
must respect the quality of life issues which result from protracted delay caused by
highway incidents, including environmental, economic, and impacts to public health and
safety exacerbated by lengthy and often unnecessary closures and delays.  
Recent federal initiatives, combined with improvements in information
technology which allows the public to gather a clearer image of what is occurring on the
highway system, has generated a significant interest in the integration of public safety and
transportation incident response and congestion mitigation. Several key program areas
have been encouraged at a national level, while new transportation and communication
technologies have allowed for improved coordination of incident detection, verification,
response and clearance.
A partnership between State Transportation and State Police agencies in New
York’s Hudson Valley area has been a leader in the integration of incident management
services, and a variety of programs and projects have been initiated as a result of this
collaboration. Several of these efforts have achieved national attention, and further
opportunities for partnering are being explored.

Henry de Vries

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 26 - 28, 2004 San Antonio, Texas

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s new research and technology program – Driver, Vehicle, and Roadside Strategies for 2010 (DVRS for 2010) – adopted a data-driven methodology to maximize its research funds and to ensure that its research activities directly support the agency’s mission and safety goals.  The chosen methodology combines statistical analyses, a balanced scorecard approach, and the gathering of expert opinion to achieve the program’s objectives.  DVRS for 2010 is among the first programs within FMCSA to explicitly link its funding decisions to the agency’s performance measures and expected safety benefits.  A modified form of the DVRS for 2010 methodology currently is being integrated into all of FMCSA’s research and technology activities.  This paper discusses the DVRS for 2010 methodology, the program’s key findings and how some of the program’s components are being mainstreamed into research and technology initiatives across FMCSA.

Cambridge Systematics, Inc.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 26 - 28, 2004 San Antonio, Texas

This paper describes the results of using Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) generated incidents as an incident detection method in an Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS). An effort was completed in April of 2002 at TransGuide, the Texas Department of Transportation’s Traffic Management Center (TMC) located in San Antonio, Texas, to integrate CAD or 911 call center incidents from the City of San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) into the TransGuide ATMS.

Southwest Research Institute

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 26 - 28, 2004 San Antonio, Texas

Relationships between speed choice and crash occurrence have been difficult to identify. This work examines detected speeds derived from single loops for several Southern California freeways, within and across freeway lanes, together with corresponding crash data. While a variety of factors clearly influence speed and speed variance, there is no evidence that speeds or their variation trigger crashes.

The University of Texas at Austin

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 26 - 28, 2004 San Antonio, Texas

The University of Texas at Austin

Monitoring activities in outdoor traffic scenes has applications in areas such as data collection, monitoring for traffic congestion, and surveillance for safety. In this project, we develop a camera based sensing system for monitoring activities at intersections. Two different components of the system are the vision module and the incident detection module, the former being responsible for providing information about the scene such as vehicle position, velocity, shape, etc. The incident detection module is responsible for detecting incidents such as collisions and near misses. The focus of this work is on the vision module, in particular vehicle tracking. Tracking in outdoor scenes using camera is aected by illumination changes, traffic congestion, clutter, and stop-and-go motion of the vehicles. In this paper, we show that we can attain decent tracking despite these conditions by using two different tracking modalities. The rst one is a region tracker which uses the results of the scene segmentation for tracking. The second tracker known as the Mean Shift Tracker, makes use of the color distribution of the vehicles. The results from the two trackers, namely, the vehicle's position
are combined sequentially in each step.
Keywords{ Motion segmentation, tracking, Mean Shift Tracking, data association.

University of Minnesota

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 26 - 28, 2004 San Antonio, Texas