Monitoring of Urban Roadway Safety Hazards from Existing Bus-based Video Imagery: Phase 2

Traffic safety is diminished by drivers’ changing lanes in queued traffic at signalized intersections, bus stops, and construction zones, mixes of vehicle classes, variability in speeds, and vehicle overtaking. Assessing locations with these recurring but dynamic hazards requires extensive and ongoing data collection. Traditional data collection methods rely on sensors at permanent or temporary fixed locations, which are costly, labor intensive, and provide limited collection over time and space and only of some hazard contributors. Moreover, the location of these sensors may be influenced by factors other than optimal sampling, such as requests from well-organized constituencies. Therefore, relying on the traditional methods could lead to missing high-risk conditions resulting in decreased safety and inequitable outcomes. Transit buses operate regularly over wide networks, and most bus fleets are already equipped with cameras that record the environment inside and outside buses for liability, security, and safety purposes. Consequently, the imagery is available for other uses at near-zero marginal cost, and the extensive spatial coverage of transit fleets would provide comprehensive views that could be used to determine times and locations of regularly occurring safety hazards. Moreover, this imagery has been shown by the principal investigators (PIs) to be effective in monitoring traffic volumes across time and space, information that provides exposure-based context for identifying safety hazards. In the current phase 1 project (year-1), the PIs are investigating the use of available, repeated, and extensive imagery recorded by cameras mounted on transit buses in regular operation to identify “hazardous hotspots”. The proposed phase 2 project (year-2) would build on the phase 1 investigations. The PIs have been obtaining transit bus-based video imagery to estimate traffic flows across the Ohio State University (OSU) campus and providing summary results to campus planners and operators on a regular basis. The OSU campus will again be used as a living lab testbed. The size and diversity of land uses make the campus representative of urban areas. Moreover, the campus has been undergoing major construction activities, which allows investigation of different infrastructure conditions that could influence traffic safety. Using the campus as an experimental testbed also allows for in-situ ground-truth observations to assess the accuracy of the video-based results. Hazards being considered in phase 1 include lane specific queue lengths at intersections and bus stops and vehicle type mix with an emphasis on vulnerable vehicles (e.g., bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles). Frequency of lane-changing in the presence of queues, speeds, and speed variation where autos conflict with vulnerable vehicles are also important safety factors. In phase 2, the ability to measure these hazards from the imagery would be investigated, and methods to do so would be developed. In addition, changes in speeds at construction zones measured from the imagery would be explored given the safety hazards associated with these zones. Moreover, while the identification of hazards in phase 1 is being demonstrated using semi-automatic techniques based on a Graphical User Interface, in phase 2 automation of the identification of hazards will be pursued.

• Record URL:
  • https://ppms.cit.cmu.edu/projects/detail/503

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $213486
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3552344811

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Carnegie Mellon University

  Pittsburgh, PA  United States 

  Safety21 University Transportation Center

  Carnegie Mellon University
  Pittsburgh, PA  United States  15213
• Project Managers:

  Stearns, Amy

• Performing Organizations:

  Ohio State University

  Columbus, OH  United States 
• Principal Investigators:

  Mishalani, Rabi

• Start Date: 20240701
• Expected Completion Date: 20250630
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Data collection; Image analysis; Traffic safety; Traffic speed; Traffic surveillance; Transit buses; Work zones
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01933403
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Safety21 University Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: 69A3552344811
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Oct 13 2024 9:34AM