Safety

Long before Hurricane Katrina and the active hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, there was Hurricane Andrew. In 1992, Category 5 Hurricane Andrew devastated the south Florida region, packing 165 mph winds and causing $30 billion in damage. With that hurricane, many state and local agencies were enlightened on what a major hurricane could do to local inhabitants and the surrounding infrastructure. This single hurricane rewrote building design standards and redefined emergency response plans. State and local officials began reviewing their current facilities and were surprised to find out that most buildings could not even withstand a Category 3 hurricane impact. Many first responders’ warehouses and facilities may not even withstand a strong Category 1. With that review, Pinellas County embarked on a program to hardening facilities in the mid 90’s and came to a realization there was a dramatic need to establish an emergency responder’s facility that could house workers and equipment throughout the strongest of hurricanes, and be able to be the first out the door to start the cleanup effort. This paper will summarize the characteristics and abilities of the new Pinellas County Emergency Responders Building and traffic control center.

Pinellas County Public Works

Presented at the 18th World Congress on ITS, October 2011, Orlando, Florida

Photo enforcement has been around for a number of years, but has been getting more attention recently. Across the nation, states are taking diverse approaches to implementation. Legislation has been enacted and enforcement processes are being revised to address deployment of this leading technology. Photo enforcement is an opportunity for department of safety and enforcement personnel to partner with department of transportation (DOT) and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) experts. In many cases the enforcement and DOT industries are working together to make the roadways safer and facilitate smooth traffic flows.

Controversy and misconceptions surround photo enforcement. The motoring public envisions that this enforcement technology is generating large sums of money and taxpayers are suggesting that this type of enforcement approach is a “new tax”. This paper will address factors such as trends, varied implementation results and public relations activities.

BRW Inc.

Presented at the 10th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, May 1-4, 2000 Boston, MA

The purpose of this research is to develop a framework for understanding the perceptions of
the various stakeholders involved in the planning, funding and deployment of ITS programs
for public safety and security. We collected the perceptions of thirty-two stakeholders
participating in roundtable discussions at an ITS America Annual Meeting. In this paper we
first provide an explanation of the reasons such research is needed. We consider the previous
publications and research-to-date as a backdrop to the study. The data collection and analysis
methodologies are described next. We conclude with a conceptual framework based on the
data analysis and a discussion of the implications.

University of Montevallo

Intelligent Transportation Society of America

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

Evacuating large municipal areas during emergencies in an efficient manner is one of the
critical concerns of most responsible management agencies. Previous studies focus mainly on
strategic evacuation plans or controls for the passenger cars, giving inadequate attention to
those pedestrians community with transit systems or other modes especially in metropolitan
areas. This study has developed a n evacuation planning module f o r pedestrians in
Washington D.C. and integrates it with the system developed for passenger-car evacuation.
The proposed module first guides people to the nearest metro-stations, and then applies the
knowledge-based method to choose proper evacuation routes for shuttles to pick up evacuees.
It also includes the plans for guiding pedestrians to the nearest evacuation route, and for
dispatching shuttles need for their evacuation.

University of Maryland, College Park

Maryland State Highway Administration

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

We developed a pedestrian detection system in order to notice a driver the existance of pedestrians. Our previous system which using HOG adaboost classifiers can detect pedestrians with high speed, however, due to the limitation of HOG features, it still has a high false positive rate. In this paper, we propose to cascade the previous pedestrian detector by a false positive remover to improve the accuracy while keeping the high speed. The proposed false positive remover is composed of two adaboost classifiers, one for grayscale image, and another for distance image. The classifier for grayscale image utilize boosted spatial co-occurrence matrix of edge directions --- a kind of improved edge feature proposed in this paper. The classifier for distance image boosts shape features together with spatial co-occurrence matrix of edge directions extracted from the distance image, which is obtained from a stereo camera. Experimental results are presented to validate our method.

Panasonic Corporation

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