Travel Behavior and Transportation Safety: Exploring Land Use and Infrastructure
Traditional road safety paradigms have primarily emphasized modifying road user behavior through the “three E’s”: engineering, education, and enforcement. Within the framework of occupational epidemiology, these strategies can be understood as efforts to control roadway hazards. Yet, a more effective mechanism lies in eliminating hazards altogether. This research investigates the extent to which travel behaviors contribute to hazard elimination and, in turn, influence overall transportation safety outcomes. Specifically, the research team examines variables such as commute time, mode share, and vehicle miles traveled, as well as secondary factors including fuel prices and vehicle age. By adopting this perspective, the team’s work moves beyond the conventional road safety focus of controlling behaviors on the road and seeks to situate more fundamental travel behavior patterns as central to reducing transportation risk. After assessing the effectiveness of hazard elimination, the team extends its analysis to examine which combinations of land use and infrastructure are most conducive to achieving this outcome. The investigation may cover multiple spatial levels including the census tract, city, and state levels. However, the diversity of land use and infrastructure contexts within the United States is relatively limited; for instance, 82% of states report commute mode shares by automobile of 90% or higher. To broaden the scope of comparison, the research team also incorporates international cases that provide greater variation in travel behavior and built environment characteristics. The team then connects these findings to policy implications. Specifically, contemporary road safety frameworks such as Vision Zero and Safe Systems give little explicit attention to the primary variables examined in this study. A key question, therefore, is how these factors might be meaningfully integrated into existing transportation safety paradigms. By emphasizing broader travel behaviors rather than focusing exclusively on road-user behavior, this research advances a more holistic approach to transportation safety. This project also includes administrative, technology transfer, workforce development, and education expenses that will go toward the administration of CPBS (e.g., the CPBS program manager’s salary, a course buyout for the director, honorariums for CPBS advisory board members) as well as K-12 support (e.g., collaboration with the New Mexico Summer Transportation Institute) and workforce development efforts (e.g., collaboration with the New Mexico Local Technical Assistance Program).
- Record URL:
Language
- English
Project
- Status: Active
- Funding: $342,853.00
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Contract Numbers:
69A3552348336
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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:
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology
Department of Transportation
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC United States 20590 -
Project Managers:
Stearns, Amy
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Performing Organizations:
University of New Mexico
Department of Civil Engineering
Albuquerque, NM United States 87131 -
Principal Investigators:
Ferenchak, Nick
- Start Date: 20251201
- Expected Completion Date: 20261130
- Actual Completion Date: 0
- USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Infrastructure; Land use; Traffic safety; Travel behavior; Travel modes
- Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01971455
- Record Type: Research project
- Source Agency: Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety
- Contract Numbers: 69A3552348336
- Files: UTC, RIP
- Created Date: Nov 17 2025 5:19PM