Investigation of Vulnerable Road User Fatalities and Serious Injuries on Freeways

Although pedestrians, bicyclists, and other vulnerable road users are not “supposed” to be present on freeways and other high-speed limited access roadways, a substantial proportion of all vulnerable road user (VRU) crashes occur in these environments. Due to high speeds, casualty severity is often high, resulting in many deaths and severe, life-changing injuries. These events heavily burden victims, families, and medical insurance programs funded by employers and taxpayers. Spot-checks of the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) Bicyclist and Pedestrian Crash Map and findings from research in other states indicate these casualties involve wide-ranging circumstances. A few examples include individuals attempting to cross a freeway or other high-speed limited-access roadway at grade, drivers walking to find help with a disabled vehicle, on-the-job incidents involving road workers and first responders, and crashes involving unhoused people who camp on the right-of-way. This action-focused project will conduct a thorough review of previous research on freeway/expressway VRU casualties, develop a typology of non-overlapping categories that can be used to analyze them, compile the North Carolina VRU casualty data for freeways and other highspeed limited access roadways, review crash narratives to verify that they occurred on such a roadway (and not, for example, on the arterial level of a freeway overpass), manually assign each fatality and serious injury to one of the categories in the typology, prepare maps that illustrate their location and nature, and identify both locationally-specific and statewide actions that can be taken by NCDOT and other agencies to reduce the frequency and severity of VRU crashes on high-speed limited access roadways.​

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Sponsor Organizations:

  North Carolina Department of Transportation

  Research and Development
  1549 Mail Service Center
  Raleigh, NC  United States  27699-1549
• Project Managers:

  Kim, Jay

• Performing Organizations:

  North Carolina State University, Raleigh

  Institute for Transportation Research and Education
  Campus Box 8601
  Raleigh, NC  United States  27695-8601
• Start Date: 20250801
• Expected Completion Date: 20270731
• Actual Completion Date: 0

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Crash analysis; Fatalities; Freeways; Injury severity; Mapping; Pedestrian safety; Pedestrian vehicle crashes; Vulnerable road users
• Geographic Terms: North Carolina
• Subject Areas: Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01966080
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: North Carolina Department of Transportation
• Files: RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Sep 18 2025 12:57AM