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

This paper describes a general method to generate warnings for the driver of a vehicle. The
method takes into account the current measured state of the own vehicle and observed objects, the uncertainties of these measurements, models of driver, vehicle, and object behavior, and information about the environment, especially how it influences the driver and the observed object. This method is designed to work in two dimensions. It is being implemented into a side collision warning system for transit buses.

Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

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

This research effort examined the effects of three different types of cell-phone dialing on driving behavior: discrete 10-digit phone dialing using a hands-free, voice-activated system; continuous 10-digit phone dialing using a hands-free, voice-activated system; and manual 10-digit phone dialing using a cell-phone held in a cradle.  The driving behavior of the three dialing tasks was compared to normal driving.  Thirty-six participants, divided into two age groups (i.e., 18-34 years and 45-65 years, 18 participants per group), drove an instrumented vehicle on an interstate freeway and were allowed to perform tasks when they felt comfortable.  The dependent measurements that were analyzed included task completion time, average speed, percent of time out of the lane, and percent of glance time to several locations (e.g., forward roadway, mirrors).  
The results of the driving performance did not result in any differences in terms of average speed and lane maintenance, although the optimal placement of the hand-held cell phone may have influenced this finding. The results of the glance analysis suggest that glance patterns during hands-free, voice-activated dialing and baseline driving are similar, while manual dialing of a cell-phone resulted in a significant decrease in both forward and peripheral glances, as well as
glances toward the speedometer.

OnStar Corporation

Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

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

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Transportation Management Centers (TMC)
provide a lucrative partner for regional and statewide Emergency Management Agencies
(EMA). Even before the heightened interest in domestic security issues, EMAs have been
approaching TMC’s in hopes of leveraging their access to surveillance and other key
transportation service providers for “eyes-on-the-road” information without having to travel
out of the emergency management center and in to harms way.  

This paper documents two recent efforts in the US by local and regional EMAs in their
efforts to coordinate with and collocate within TMCs.  The first case study is that of
Columbus, Ohio where the county EMA desires to collocate with regional transportation
resources, including transit, traffic signal, freeway and other safety operations.  And a
second case study is that of Chicago, Illinois where the city’s Emergency Operations Center
(EOC) plans is studying the feasibility of building a joint facility with the city’s TMC.
There are positives, negatives and differing reasons for wanting to combine EMAs and
TMCs. This paper explains the reasons for each approach, assesses some of the advantages
of these partnerships for both parties, and delves in to some of the hurdles the partners are
working to overcome in achieving their respective goals.

Cambridge Systematics

Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission

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

Conventional Cruise Control (CCC) systems are present on most production vehicles today that simply hold a vehicle at a preset speed. This relieves the driver of this task, making the overall driving task easier, more enjoyable and less fatiguing. However, CCC systems are only useful for holding steady speeds and when the appropriate vehicle speed is not influenced by the actions of other vehicles. Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) normally acts like a CCC, but has sensors that detect the range and relative speed of a vehicle ahead, matching speed with that vehiclewhen necessary.  Generally the places where CCC and ACC do not work are the most challenging and dangerous driving situations where drivers have several tasks to manage at the same time. This is both unpleasant for the driver and dangerous. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) systems address this limitation by using vehicle computers and digital vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to hold a vehicle speed determined through a cooperative process between a vehicle and its neighbors.  
Experimental CACC systems have been simulated and implemented for automated highways for the support of platoons. This report discusses a CACC implemented as an emulator and installed as a user defined driver model in the traffic micro-simulation code VISSIM. The CACC emulator is designed to take over vehicle speed control when the vehicle enters a critical zone, which in this case is either a weave or a merge zone. VISSIM simulates a roadway with traffic and measures mobility and traffic density through the critical zone. Mobility of vehicles under  control of the CACC emulator is compared with the mobility of vehicles under the control of VISSIM's driver model to demonstrate the effect of the CACC emulator on mobility. VISSIM is also used to record headway time through the critical zone as a measure of safety and following stability.

Ford Motor Company

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