Developing a framework to combine the different protective features of a safe system

Transportation safety professionals strive to build a system on which no street user can be severely or fatally injured on. To accomplish such a safe system, it is necessary to effectively harness all the core protective opportunities provided by the system. Despite the increasing consensus that this needs to be thought of as a systems problem, the considerations for each of these layers of protection are siloed, and many of the protective features are evaluated in terms of potential lives saved due to a specific improvement. The proposed research will examine what happens when we no longer assume each of the individual components holds a desirable level of protection for a certain circumstance, but that they contribute to a larger joint entity (i.e., the system) that can exhibit the required characteristics or traits (i.e., safe). The conjecture here is that there is a set of protective features that can jointly fulfill the promise of a safe system. This projects aims to: 1) Determine whether kinetic energy is indeed a desirable feature that can be quantified across the different protective mechanisms of the system (e.g., roadway, vehicle, laws). 2) Analyze levels of the selected crash magnitude proxy (e.g., kinetic energy) that road users are exposed to across different parts of the network. This will be done by mode. 3) Develop a framework to quantify the overall protective capability of the system which will be benchmarked against the desired capability of the system, as established by the policy makers.

• Record URL:
  https://www.roadsafety.unc.edu/research/projects/2019r24/
• Supplemental Notes:
  • CSCRS2019R24

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $80,000
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3551747113

• 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:

  Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety

  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  Chapel Hill, NC  United States  27514
• Project Managers:

  Sandt, Laura

• Performing Organizations:

  University of California, Berkeley

  Berkeley, CA  United States  94720-1720
• Principal Investigators:

  Grembek, Offer

• Start Date: 20191001
• Expected Completion Date: 20220531
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers Program

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Crash analysis; Crash reconstruction; Kinetic energy; Network analysis (Planning); Safety; Systems analysis
• Identifier Terms: Safe System Approach
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01715886
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety
• Contract Numbers: 69A3551747113
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Sep 5 2019 2:46PM