Safety

Josh Peterman, P.E. - DKS Associates

Rafat Raie, P.E. - City of Walnut Creek, CA

Garland Wong, P.E. - City of Concord, CA

Submitted for presentation at ITSA 2004

Josh Peterman, P.E. - DKS Associates

Rafat Raie, P.E. - City of Walnut Creek, CA

Garland Wong, P.E. - City of Concord, CA

Submitted for presentation at ITSA 2004

Josh Peterman, P.E. - DKS Associates

Rafat Raie, P.E. - City of Walnut Creek, CA

Garland Wong, P.E. - City of Concord, CA

Submitted for presentation at ITSA 2004

Recent events on the nation’s highways have elevated the interest in improving safety thereon. Specific attention has been directed at improving the fatality rate from crashes involving commercial vehicles. To that end, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) was created in the Department of Transportation (DOT) and given specific safety related charters. FMCSA has commenced the process of defining a strategy intended to achieve these goals. Presently, this strategy does not specify the magnitude with which individual initiatives, or sets of initiatives, will reduce in commercial vehicle-related fatalities. Most significantly, there has not been an assessment of whether the funding from Congress is adequate to achieve the safety goals with which FMCSA has been charged. This limitation in strategic planning can be overcome by adapting an evaluation tool developed in support of the DOD (Department of Defense) acquisition process. During the Joint Counter Mine (JCM) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD), a cost-based, system-of-systems (S2) optimization process was developed, which is effective at identifying solutions that are either redundant or not cost effective. This process can be applied to quantitatively manage the application of mitigation techniques to the varied crash causes without a significant disruption of efforts by vendors and users. Such an approach supports a formalized decision process using an analytical examination of alternative solutions. Decisions between alternative safety management strategies can be made based on cost effectiveness and the magnitude of improvements in the fatality metric. A model-based decision tool also provides a documented analytical basis for decisions on the estimation of the funds necessary to achieve a desired performance level. The use of an analytical tool for evaluating alternative solutions provides the information necessary to document the basis for decisions on rejected and accepted strategies.

Ultimately, use of a model to direct safety strategies would lead to improved commercial vehicle safety and reduced operating costs. Improved commercial vehicle safety will benefit all members of the community. Motor carriers will experience reduced operating costs resulting from reduced fatality rates. Government agencies will experience reduced costs from more effective enforcement. Motor carriers and government agencies will experience improved work force stability from safer working conditions. Moreover, the most important benefit is that lives will be saved. This paper describes the operation and construction of such a planning tool.

Johns Hopkins University

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, June 4-7, 2001 Miami Beach, Florida

As Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) based on Dedicated Short Range Communication
(DSRC) continue to mature, it becomes increasingly important to establish the safety and
other latent benefits of features that are enabled by DSRC. The goal of the Crashless Zone
Pilot is to field test a number of ITS DSRC-based features and evaluate their effectiveness at
varying levels of fleet penetration. Standalone communicating devices can be employed to
enable vehicle to vehicle (V2V) as well as vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications
and driver warning systems. The naturalistic driving data that is collected as part of such an
experiment could be used to correlate quantifiable reductions in crashes and incidents directly
to penetration rates of V2V equipped vehicles coexisting with unequipped vehicles within a
controlled environment. Test participants would also receive immediate benefits in terms of
roadway information, driving comfort and convenience from the V2V and V2I features that
are deployed as part of the field test.

General Motors Research & Development Center

Presented at the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York