Safety

Car accident prevention designed to reduce injury and fatality numbers focuses on
technology and changing human behavior while behind the wheel. Modern cars and
trucks are equipped with air bags, and proximity and drift monitors are becoming more
common as well. ITS has historically taken their focus on these important hardware
technologies. But changing driver behaviors to reduce accidents is a tougher nut to crack
- especially in the United States, and ITS should take a role in helping that tough nut by
looking at ways that technology can directly affect safety by enhancing the drivers
behavior. The aviation industry has been successful in focusing safety on changing pilot
or “driver” behavior and has successfully made air travel the safest mode of travel,
largely by the use of technology. Americans believe they are born knowing how to drive
and believe they are “good” drivers resulting in a sense of invulnerability. The lack of
truly proficient drivers and effective driving skills are reasons why accidental injuries
from car collisions in America are bucking the worldwide downward trend. This attitude
by American drivers becomes especially a challenge for commercial drivers and law
enforcement drivers, who beyond regular car driving are operating extreme vehicles
under extreme, often dangerous situations.

University of Central Florida

Paper submitted for publication and presentation at the ITS America’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition

Speeding is a significant contributor to a significant portion of highway collisions.  For work
zones in particular, the speeding problem is compounded by on-site road re-configuration,
narrowed lanes, or poor visibility.  This paper describes a recent study in California that is
designed to assess the technical performance of automated speed enforcement (ASE) equipment
in the field.  Several traffic monitoring systems were field tested with an automated speed
enforcement system at a study site in California.  The study site was located on a rural two-lane
highway, where severe collisions occurred frequently and speeding appeared to be a significant
factor.  The ASE equipment and other devices were found to detect 2-5 % of passing vehicles to
travel in excess of 65 mph in a highway with a posted speed limit of 55 mph.

University of California at Berkeley

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

Environment-understanding technology is vital for intelligent vehicles that are expected to automatically respond to fast-changing environments and dangerous situations. Achieving perceptual abilities requires automatic detection of static and dynamic obstacles and estimation of their related information. Conventional methods independently detect individual pieces of overall information. Each process is computationally heavy and often produces noisy results without high reliability. Here we propose a fusion-based and layered-based methodology to systematically detect dynamic and static obstacles and obtain their location/timing information for visible and infrared sequences. The proposed obstacle-detection methodology takes advantage of connections among different data and increases the estimation accuracy of information about obstacles, yet reduces computing time, thus improving environment-understanding abilities and driving safety.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

Accidents  at  crossroads  or  intersections  account  for  half  of  all  fatal  accident  occurrences  in Japan. It is conjectured that the occurrence of overlooking or misjudgment at crossroads or at intersections  is  more  than  those  on  the  road  between  intersections.  Accident  reduction measures for such situations are important in view of total accident reduction needs. Research and development for accident prevention system in similar situations is ongoing in Japan and abroad. In order to develop an appropriate accident prevention system, the authors studied the effectiveness  of  accident prevention  systems  such  as  (a) road-to-vehicle  cooperation  system, (b) vehicle-to-vehicle cooperation system and (c) autonomous system to the near miss incident scene classified by its occurrence mechanism. It was found that each system proves effective in preventing an accident that could arise from near miss incident scene.

Mitsubishi Motors Corporation

Akita Prefectural University

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

Dynamic  Motorway  Traffic  Management  and Control has  been  developed  and  implemented worldwide  with  the  aim  of  increasing  efficiency,  reliability,  safety  and  reducing environmental  impacts  without  necessitating  major  physical  changes  in  the  road infrastructure.  The  impacts  of  these  systems  are  difficult  to  observe  and  evaluate.  In  this paper a study of the impacts of the recommended variable speed limits (VSL) on individual
traffic  characteristics  is  proposed  on  the  basis  of  different  statistical  tests  on  data  of  before and after application of the VSL on E4 motorway in Stockholm. VSL contribute to more even traffic flow distribution between lanes. Better speed distribution between vehicles and a sharp decrease of speed variance in all lanes. Time headway equal and less than 1 reduced by 43% and frequency of lane changing reduced by 50%.

Royal Institute of Technology

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