Free subscriptionNovember 1998 Issue 6

From the Editor:

Cindy Kerckhoffs



Next Issue:

Parking Management

This month the Urban Mobility Professional will be discussing the topic of Traffic Safety. Amongst others you will find information regarding "Safety aspects of clustered highways", "Intelligent speed control, which could reduce accidents" etc. Furthermore you will also find expert profiles, press releases, Internet links etc.

As you may know, the next issue we will publish is in January, which means that there will be no issue in December. The January issue of the UMP will discuss "Parking Management", you can already participate by sending expert profiles, articles etc. to my e-mail address (editor@mobility-net.com). If you are interesred in presenting your company with a logo, URL, e-mail and short description, please contact our marketing manager a.hartog@mobility-net.com.

And if you would like to have an overview of future issues, please go to http://www.mobility-net.com/ump. Here you will find a lising of topics which we will be discussing  up to June 1999.

On this page you will also have the opportunity to particate in one or more of these issues.

Urban Mobility Events

Since a couple of weeks, Urban Mobility Network has created a new "Events" database, which provides information on Urban Mobility tradeshows, exhibitions and congresses worldwide. This database is searchable on date, country or keyword and offers the possibility to add your own events very easily. The new events added will be viewed by our information manager and activated in the data base within 24 hours. I would like to ask you to take a look at the new "events" database by going to http://www.mobility-net.com, choosing the desired platform and clicking on events. I would also like to invite you to add your information on Urban Mobility tradeshows, exhibitions and congresses.


Inside this issue:

Editor:

Cindy Kerckhoffs
P.O. Box 917
Maastricht
The Netherlands

Tel: +31 43 321 30 22
Fax: +31 43 321 10 62
editor@mobility-net.com

Published by:

The Urban Mobility Network Group
http://www.mobility-net.com

Traffic Safety

  • Point of view:
    • Road Safety Audit - The Australian Approach
  • Safety aspects of clustered highways
  • 4th Annual conference on transportation, traffic safety & health
    • Normal Behaviour and Traffic Safety: Violations, Errors, Lapses and Crashes
  • Plus...
    • Traffic Safety Forum
    • Ask the experts
    • Press releases
    • Internet links
... and Urban Mobility

For other Urban Mobility related information: events, headlines, articles ... etc. visit the Urban Mobility Network platforms at:

http://www.mobility-net.com


A point of view of a Traffic Safety professional

Road Safety Audit - The Australian Approach

by Phillip W Jordan

Summary

In mid-1992, AUSTROADS (the national association of road transport and traffic authorities in Australasia) initiated a project to examine the benefits and costs of a national approach to road safety audit. After reviewing audit processes in Australia as well as internationally, it was concluded that road safety audit has real safety benefits for road users and that these benefits can be greater when the process is applied on a national basis. The end product of this project, the AUSTROADS (1994) Road Safety Audit guidelines, is now the focus for this important road safety engineering initiative in highway authorities around Australia and New Zealand. It has been well received in other countries as well, including South Africa, Malaysia, Canada and the United States of America. In each of these countries it has been used to assist with the introduction of the road safety audit process.

This paper outlines road safety audit from the AUSTROADS perspective, providing an introduction into: road safety audit, it's costs and potential benefits, and how it can lead to safer roads. It also includes some lessons which have been learnt from road safety audits, highlighting the positive safety contribution that road safety audit is beginning to make. These audits were successful in identifying (and correcting) serious safety deficiencies in road designs which may otherwise have resulted in accidents. The paper also outlines some of the current issues in road safety audit which are applicable at the international level.

Introduction

Many road authorities have "blackspot" programs concerned with accident reduction (the development of accident remedial measures for high accident frequency sites). In the last few years, some road authorities have been focussing on accident prevention (ensuring that the design of new road and traffic schemes will provide a high level of safety), attempting to prevent accidents from happening, or at least to ensure that any accident effects are minimised. This is the single most significant difference between accident blackspot work and road safety audit. One process aims to reduce the number of accidents at an existing site, the other aims to prevent the very first accident from ever happening! Whilst accident reduction work continues to be a major component, accident prevention - via road safety audit - is now a part of the road design process in Australia and New Zealand.

AUSTROADS (1994) defines road safety audit as - "a formal examination of an existing or future road or traffic project, or any project which interacts with road users, in which an independent, qualified examiner reports on the project's accident potential and safety performance."

Belcher and Proctor (1993) explain that safety audit works in two ways to ensure that safety is improved - firstly by removing preventable accident producing elements (such as inappropriate intersection layouts) at the design stages, and secondly by mitigating the effects of remaining problems by the inclusion of suitable accident-reducing elements (such as anti-skid surfacing and crash barriers).

Austroads stages of audit

The earlier in the design process that a road safety audit takes place the more likely it is to be able to effectively influence safety in that scheme. The AUSTROADS project recognised this and developed a five stage audit process with emphasis on early intervention, namely:

Feasibility Stage:- By providing a specific safety input at the feasibility stage of a scheme, road safety audit can influence fundamental issues such as route choice, standards, impact on and continuity with the existing adjacent network, and intersection or interchange provision.

Draft Design Stage:- This audit occurs on completion of the preliminary road design. Typical considerations will include horizontal and vertical alignments, and intersection layouts. Subsequent significant changes in road alignment become much harder to achieve after this stage as land acquisition and other associated legal matters become finalised.

Detailed Design Stage:- This audit occurs on completion of the detailed road design but before the preparation of contract documents. Typical considerations include geometric layout, linemarkings, signals, lighting, signing, intersection details, clearances to roadside objects (crash barriers/frangibility,) and provision for vulnerable road users. Attention to detail at this design stage can do much to reduce the costs and disturbances associated with last minute changes which may otherwise be brought about with a Pre-Opening Stage audit. It is cheaper and easier to change some marks on a drawing than to re-build/rectify a hazardous treatment.

Pre-Opening Stage:- This audit involves a detailed inspection of a new scheme prior to its opening. The new road is driven, ridden and walked (when appropriate) by the auditor (or audit team) to ensure that the safety needs of all road users are provided for. A night time inspection is particularly important to check signing, delineation and other darkness-related issues.

The Audit of Existing Roads:- This audit aims to ensure that the safety features of a road are compatible with the functional classification of the road, and to identify any feature which may develop over time into a safety concern. This stage of audit has been open to much debate in recent times, amid concerns that too much attention to this stage may lead to disillusionment when funds cannot meet the costs necessary to improve all the safety deficiencies. This debate will continue for some time, and in a era of restricted budgets the best advice is to be selective in having audits undertaken on existing roads. One option is to have a remedial budget set before the audit is done, and to ask the audit team to prioritise the work up to that limit.

A future stage of audit which will be included in the next edition of the AUSTROADS guidelines is the safety audit of roadworks sites, including the traffic management and roadside crash protection. A number of these audits have been carried out on major road projects in Melbourne and the results have been positively received by both the contractor and the client.

*Click here to download the full article*


Safety aspects of clustered highways

By Mr. N. Rosmuller

Introduction

Especially in those Western European countries which intend to be leading in distribution and transportation, the ever increasing lack of space is a fast growing problem. However, in addition to space consumption, transportation activities and transportation systems bring about numerous other negative external effects, such as landscape fragmentation, noise, smell and risks. Protecting rural regions from these negative external effects has been the reason why several European countries have included ‘clustering’ as one of the main designing and aligning principles in the development of additional transportation systems. Clustering means that transportation systems are being traced immediately parallel to another. Clustering has gain its popularity because it is suppose to concentrate or even reduce negative environmental impacts of transportation activities and transport systems. However, after a closer look, it can be seen that clustering results in new kinds of complex and tightly coupled systems. Especially from a safety point of view, this increasing complexity is worrying.

This paper is meant to find out whether or not the clustering of highways to other kinds of transportation systems affects safety levels. Therefore, physical and functional aspects of clustered transportation systems are addressed (chapter 2). Subsequently, in chapter 3, the fundamental components of risk analysis are addressed, as they are accident scenarios (what can happen?), consequences (if it happens, what are the consequences?) and frequencies (how likely is that this will happen?). In chapter 4, these risk analysis components are examined for clustered highways. After identifying clustering related accident scenarios, the accident frequencies and consequences of clustered highways segments are compared to accident frequencies and consequences of not-clustered, or singular, highway segments. This comparison is based upon an empirical highway accident data. In chapter 5, main conclusions are drawn, and as a result, some directions for further research are proposed.

2. Clustered transportation systems

The essence of clustering transportation systems is that transportation systems are being traced immediately and parallel to another. From a physical point of view, clustered transportation systems know five characteristics, namely [Rosmuller, 1997a]:

  • mutual distance: the distance between parallel running transportation systems.
  • longitudinal distance: the length for which the clustered transportation systems run parallel.
  • kind of transportation system: transportation systems may be open or closed. Open here means that drivers may be influenced by external conditions for example weather conditions. Highways, railways, waterways and airways are open transportation systems. Closed here means drivers cannot be influenced by external conditions. Pipelines and power wires are closed transportation systems.
  • clustering method: transportation systems could be clustered in two ways, coordinated or mixed. Coordinated means that no single part of a transportation system is within the boundaries of another transportation system. Mixed stands for the opposite which means some parts of a transportation system are within the boundaries of another transportation system.
  • arrangement: arrangement refers to the position of transportation systems with respect to each other or the environment.

Using a front-view, four of these five physical clustering aspects are visualized in figure 1 below. Only the longitudinal distance is not visible in this figure. In this figure a railway and a highway have been aligned in two arrangements near a residential area. The arrows indicate some of the potential risks from both highway and railway traffic to each other and the residential area.

Figure 1: Physical aspects of transport corridors and possible risks.

Physical aspects of clustering are relevant, but in respect to safety, even more relevant are the resulting functional aspects of clustering. Here, transportation systems are functionally limited in two ways, namely: a) kind of transportation systems; because the focus in this research is on transporting people and goods, electric power-wires are excluded for further research. Because the research focus is on clustering, airways are excluded for further research. Airways, except for the runway parts, are not spatially clustered to other kinds of transportation systems. This implies highways, railways, waterways and pipelines remain for further research. b) scale of transportation systems; the focus is on nation’s major transportation infrastructures because safety and risks are generally an integral part of impact assessments for such main infrastructures. This means that for example streets in villages, ditches or distribution pipelines are excluded from the research.

By clustering transportation systems, large scale and complex infrastructure configurations originate, for which various authors currently articulated there concerns in respect to safety and risk [Thissen, 1993, Stoop and Van der Heijden, 1994]. These concerns regard aspects as clustering may originate unknown accident mechanisms, increased accident frequencies, underestimated accident consequences and eventually capacity problems for emergency response organizations. Here, various issues arise, however of prime importance is whether or not evidence exists for the above described safety and risk concerns as a result of clustering.

*Click here to view the full article*


4th Annual conference on transportation, traffic safety & health

Normal Behaviour and Traffic Safety: Violations, Errors, Lapses and Crashes

TOKYO, JAPAN, OCTOBER 21 - 22, 1998

By: Stephen G Stradling1, Dianne Parker1, Timo Lajunen1 , Michelle L Meadows2 & Cheng Qiu Xie1

1Department of Psychology, The University of Manchester, UK;
2Department of Psychology, The University of Staffordshire, UK.

Abstract

This paper summarises recent work by the Manchester Driver Behaviour Research Group. In a number of national questionnaire studies in the UK we have identified a threefold typology of aberrant driving behaviours, distinguishing

  • Lapses (e.g., You try to pull away from the traffic lights in the wrong gear),
  • Errors (e.g., You fail to see a ‘Stop’ or ‘Give Way’ sign) and
  • Violations (e.g., speeding, tailgating, running red lights).

This work has been replicated in Australia, Sweden and China, and data is currently being collected in Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Holland and Finland. In the UK, drivers’ scores on Violations, not Errors or Lapses, are statistically associated with their three-year crash involvement, both retrospectively and prospectively, and for both Active Crashes ("I hit ... ") and Passive Crashes ("I was hit by ...").

Violations are more frequent amongst young drivers, male drivers, and high mileage drivers.

  • Active Crashes are best predicted by Violation score plus driver gender.
  • Passive Crashes are best predicted by exposure (annual mileage) plus Violation score.

The consequences of these findings for road safety countermeasures will be briefly discussed, noting the need to change drivers’ attitudes.

Psychological Factors in Crash Involvement

Ever since the ground-breaking accident investigations two decades ago by Barbara Sabey (Sabey & Taylor, 1980), road-safety countermeasure policy and design have been driven by the much quoted finding that ‘65% of automobile accidents are wholly as a result and up to 95% of automobile accidents are at least partly as a result of human error’. This suggests that the situation may be improved by reducing opportunity for driver error: typically by concentrating on and improving the skills component of initial driver training and of any subsequent remedial re-training.

However, while driving is clearly a skill-based activity, there is now a general consensus emerging that there is more to driving well - and to remaining crash-free - than technical competence. As US expert Patricia Waller noted recently:

Passing a skills test is not related to subsequent crashes for motorcyclists (Taylor & Lockwood, 1990), and there is little evidence that a skills test can screen out unsafe drivers (West & Hall, 1997). Likewise, in a review of the German literature, Noordzij (1990) found that, while a certain minimal level of skill is necessary for driving, higher levels of skill are no guarantee that the skill be used appropriately. This finding is consistent with the finding in the US that race car drivers, who are acknowledged to be highly skilful drivers, actually have worse on-the-road driving records, taking other relevant variables into account (Williams & O’Neill, 1974). Some skill is essential, but the relationship between skill and driving performance is not linear. (Waller, 1997, p.197).

The view we have been developing through our research in Manchester, England is that driving is not just a skill-based, but also a rule-governed and an expressive activity. Becoming a driver certainly involves mastering the technical skills of vehicle handling and positioning, but it also involves learning the rules (both formal and informal) required to ‘read the road’ and anticipate hazards, and constraining the expression within a social context of those individual preferences which may bring immediate gratification to one driver whilst placing others at risk.

Within the last decade there has been considerable research into the social psychology of driving: looking at the beliefs, values, attitudes, evaluations, motivations, personality traits, etc., of crash-involved car drivers. Figure 1 provides a summary of this body of research (Lajunen, 1997; Meadows & Stradling, in press)

*Click here to view the full article*


Traffic Safety Forum and Mailinglist:

Forum

This forum gives you the opportunity to ask questions and participate in forum discussions with other urban mobility professionals. These discussions can be regarding the above articles, but can also include other public transport topics.



I invite you to share your experiences and join our forum, which is available on http://www.mobility-net.com/forum. To participate in the forum please click on "login", leave your name/ e-mail and create a password.

Mailinglist:

The traffic mailinglist gives you the opportunity to send an e-mail to the mailinglist members whom are all traffic professionals. If you would like to subscribe to the mailinglist, please go to http://www.traffic-net.com/mailinglists and click on register.


Information regarding Traffic Safety experts:

Mr. Nils Rosmuller
n.rosmuller@sepa.tudelft.nl
http://www.sepa.tudelft.nl/

Nils Rosmuller studied Public Policy and Administration at Twente University. His interest were in the field of Civil Engineering, Economics and Social Sciences.

In addition, he studied at the Faculty for Technology and Management at Twente University where his interests were in the fields of Operational Methods and Systems Theory (OMST) Financial Management and Business Economics (FMBE).

In August 1995, he graduated in both Public Policy and Administration and Technology and Management. Since September 1995, he is working on Ph.D. project "Safety and risk analysis of transport corridors", at the School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management.

Prof. Andrea Tocchetti
tocchett@unina.it
http://www.unina.it/

Graduated in 1961, University of Napoli, Italy. M.S., Economics, University of Napoli, CSEI, 1974. Academic Experience

Research Interests

Interested in airport infrastructures and management since 1970. First approach on road safety on 1984. Since 1986 Prof. Tocchetti is responsable of National Researchs on road safety. The aims concern the setting-up of a method for definition of speed diagrams and design parameters in order to provide suggestions on road maintenance. Results available on request.

Scientific and Professional Societies 1994 European Consultant 1357 code, Working field: Road Transport; Rail Transport; Air Transport; Infrastructures. Specialities: Infrastructures; Economics; Traffic.

Mr. Frank C. Tecca P.E.
FCTatESC@concentric.net
http://www.concentric.net/~Fctatesc/

Frank C. Tecca P.E. brings 32 years of experience in Traffic Safety Engineering to your litigation. Eighteen (18) years as the chief responsible authority for citywide traffic operations and accident monitoring/ reduction programs:

  • 17 years with the City of Los Angeles
  • 13 years with the City of Anchorage, Alaska
  • 5 years with the City of Lake Elsinore

Member of Institute of Transportation Engineers - ITE

Member of American Public Works Association - APWA


Dr. Oliver Carsten
ocarsten@its.leeds.ac.uk
http://www.its.leeds.ac.uk/
staff/omjclong.html

Principal Research Fellow, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds and Director of the Centre for Safety Research at the University of Leeds.

Dr. Carsten has been among others:

  • project coordinator of two European Union Transport Telematics projects, one (HOPES) examining the safety impacts of the various field trials and the other (VRU-TOO) investigating ways to improve the safety and mobility of pedestrians.
  • He has lead the development of the advanced driving simulator at Leeds and has directed projects to examine techniques for reducing unsafe driving on rural arterial roads and for investigating the benefits of automatic speed control.

Ms. Nina Susanna Ranta
susanna.ranta@vtt.fi
http://www.vtt.fi/

Master of Science in Technology, Helsinki University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Surveying, (major subject: traffic engineering, second major: traffic psychology), 1997

1995- VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland) Communities and Infrastructure, Espoo, Finland (Transport and Urban planning, Traffic safety)

Research Scientist, Group Manager (1998-) Subjects of interest:

  • Effects of road safety measures.
  • Effects of speed on safety and accident costs.
  • Speed-reducing measures in urban areas.
  • Experiences of new road types between typical two-lane roads and motorways – effects on safety.
  • Effects of renewal of road traffic sanction legislation.

Mr. Roger W. Allington, PE
randra@ptialaska.net
http://www.ptialaska.net/

Civil engineer with over 40 years of traffic engineering and transportation planning experience.  Forensic engineering for traffic tort claims for over 20 years.  Experience includes wrongful death and serious injury accidents as well as providing expert testimony in establishing property values in eminent domain cases.  Expertise lies in traffic control devices, roadway geometrics, roadway lighting, pedestrian and bicycle safety, school safety and railroad grade crossings.

Jan 1995 - Present.  Consulting engineer specializing in transportation planning, traffic impact studies and traffic safety studies. Forensic engineering as it applies to the interaction of the driver-road-vehicle interface.

Professional Organizations among others:  Institute of Traffic Engineers (Life Fellow), ITE Expert Witness Council, ITE Traffic Safety Council.


Prof. J.A. Rothengatter
j.a.rothengatter@ppsw.rug.nl
http://www.oprit.rug.nl/rothengatt02/
index.htm

Studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam and obtained M.A. in 1975.  Obtained Ph.D. in Social Sciences at the University of Groningen in 1981. Worked as research assistant at the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research, as research fellow at the Health Authorities in Amsterdam and as senior research fellow at the Department of Psychology of the University of Groningen. From 1989-1992 associate director of the Traffic Research Centre. Since 1992  professor of traffic psychology at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, Centre of Environmental & Traffic Psychology.

Present functions among others: Editor of Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour. Member of the editorial board of IATSS Research and the Revue des Recherches des Transports et Sécurités.

Dr Steve Stradling
s.stradling@napier.ac.uk



Dr Steve Stradling is a psychologist interested in car drivers and other land transport users. He spent 10 years at Manchester University in the Psychology Department where he was a founder member of the Manchester Driver Behaviour Research Group whose internationally recognised work has identified the motivations, beliefs and attitudes which characterises crash-involved car drivers.

He believes that changing social norms by changing attitudes is the key to further progress in road safety. He has recently taken up a Readership at the newly formed Transport Research Institute at Napier University in Edinburgh where he is working with colleagues from a variety of social science and engineering disciplines on aspects of road safety and travel mode choice.

Mr. Gerry Forbes M. Eng.,
gforbes@stci.net
 


Gerry Forbes, M.Eng., P.Eng., is Senior Manager of Safety Programmes with Synectics Transportation Consultants Inc. offering expert consulting services in road safety and transportation.  He has extensive knowledge in the areas of geometric highway design, traffic control devices, highway safety programmes, and traffic calming.  Gerry has wide experience in the transportation, roads and traffic engineering fields and has been involved in several freeway, urban and rural traffic engineering and road management systems projects in both the public and private sectors.

Gerry is a member of the Institute of Transportation Engineers and is a member of their Expert Witness Council and the Transportation Safety Council.  He is also a Lecturer in Transportation Engineering at McMaster University.


Information regarding expert Companies:

Peek Traffic
wsowell@transyt.peek-traffic.com
http://www.peek-traffic.com

Peek Traffic Systems, Inc. is based in Tallahassee, Florida and is part of the Thermo Electron family of companies based in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Peek’s Tallahassee facility is the largest of Peek’s North American operations. Peek Traffic Systems is the U.S. market leader in the design, development, manufacture, marketing and after-sale support of both hardware and software to meet the needs of the traffic control industry.

Grontmij NV
communicatie@grontmij.nl
http://www.grontmij.com/

Grontmij, Consulting Engineers, is working in the Netherlands and internationally to improve the environment in which people live and work...

With a workforce of 2800, Grontmij provides services to government and in- dustry. The Grontmij Group has grown into a full scale engineering company covering environment, infrastructure, physical planning and buildings.

Synectics Transportation Consultants Inc.
 

Synectics Transportation Consultants Inc. provides expert consulting services in road safety and transportation.  The Synectics road safety team offers expert integrated engineering services in the field of motor vehicle crash prevention, helping communities and road authorities to provide a safer environment for all road users.  Synectics is a blend of professional engineers and leading academics who are ready to address deficiencies and implement road safety solutions at a systems management level as well as at individual locations.


P ress releases:

Institute for Transport Studies
http://www.its.leeds.ac.uk/projects/evsc/

Intelligent speed control could reduce accidents by 35%

Injury accidents on British roads would be reduced by 35% as a result of introducing a system that automatically limited the top speed of road vehicles to the prevailing speed limit road, while imposing lower speeds when road conditions demanded it. This is the major finding of Phase 1 of a three-year research project on “External Vehicle Speed Control”. The project is being jointly carried out by the University of Leeds and the Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA), and is being funded by the Vehicle Standards and Engineering Division of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions.

The prediction on accident savings is based on an analysis of the relationship between speed and the probability of accidents of various types and a calculation of how the new system would alter vehicle speeds, particularly those of the fastest drivers. The project leader Dr Oliver Carsten of the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds said: “It is hard to conceive of any other single intervention or system that would achieve comparable reductions in injuries and fatalities. The predicted reduction is far greater than that achieved by the compulsory wearing of seatbelts, perhaps the most successful single measure to date.”

A less sophisticated system that merely limited top speed to the legal speed limit for the road in question would result in a 20 percent reduction in injury and fatal accidents. For nearly every configuration of intelligent speed limiter, the benefits in terms of accident savings are considerably greater than the cost of introducing the system for all vehicles. For many versions of the system, the benefits would outweigh the costs by a factor of more than 3 to 1.

For more information see the Traffic Safety headlines (http://www.publictransport.com/headlines).

Universita` di Parma
http://www.ce.unipr.it/

The ARGO project is aimed at the application of new information technologies to the automotive field and, in particular to the development and test of a prototype vehicle with special safety features and driving facilities.

The first results of this 10-year-old project were demonstrated to the scientific community and to the general public during the first week of June 1998, when the ARGO vehicle -developed at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Universita` di Parma, Italy- drove itself automatically for more than 2000 km in a trip throughout Italy.

Nonetheless, the main aim of this project, started within the Eureka European PROMETHEUS project and founded also by the Italian CNR (National Research Council), was the development of a low-cost active safety system to monitor the activities of the driver and to warn the driver -or even take the control of the vehicle- in case of dangerous situations.

The vehicle's input devices are a pair of low-cost b/w cameras (the ones used in videophones) and an odometer, whilst the processing engine is a standard commercial 200 MHz PC.  Images are analyzed (25 stereo pairs per second, at a resolution of 768 x 288 pixels) in order to localize obstacles and to detect the lane position and geometry. The area ahead of the vehicle which is analyzed is about 50 meters long and 15 meters wide. A stepping motor, mounted on the steering column, allows to steer the vehicle automatically.

Information on the final statistics of the tour, as well as technical details, can be found at the following web address:

http://millemiglia.ce.unipr.it

For more information see the Traffic Safety headlines (http://www.traffic-net.com/headlines).

CERF
http://www.cerf.org

HITEC Evaluates Synthetic Road Surface Treatment; Seeking Test Sites

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 13, 1998-The Highway Innovative Technology Evaluation Center (HITEC), a service center of the Civil Engineering Research Foundation (CERF), recently began evaluating the performance of the Italgrip System. Italgrip SRL has developed the Italgrip System, an innovative road surface treatment, to deal with winding roads and high speeds-creating high quality road surfaces to reduce the risk of accidents and save lives.

The Italgrip System consists of a synthetic aggregate that is applied to existing pavements with an epoxy adhesive. Once installed, the new surface increases skid resistance and reduces the likelihood of hydroplaning.  Since its first application in Italy over eight years ago, it has reduced the incidence of accidents on roads where low friction was previously a problem.

A panel of experts formed by HITEC developed an Evaluation Plan to test the performance of the system for use throughout the U.S.  As part of the evaluation, HITEC representatives visited Italy and met with paving experts from Autostrade SPA-the organization responsible for many of Italy's toll highways-to observe the application of the Italgrip System under field conditions and inspect several existing applications.

Initial testing focusing on the freeze/thaw characteristics of the Italgrip System and a lifecycle cost analysis of the technology are being conducted by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.  HITEC is seeking additional highway and airport sites to conduct field evaluations of the system.

For more information see the Traffic Safety headlines (http://www.publictransport.com/headlines).


I nternet links:

http://www.safersys.org/

    The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is being designed to increase roadway safety, reduce motorist delays, reduce air pollution, and improve the overall productivity of commercial vehicle operations (CVO) through the use of advanced technology. The Safety and Fitness Electronic Records (SAFER) System is planned as a component of ITS. SAFER will provide carrier, vehicle, and driver safety and credential information to fixed and mobile roadside inspection stations.

  http://www.semcog.org/

    SEMCOG is a regional planning partnership, accountable to member local governments in Southeast Michigan. Its primary missions are 1) planning on issues that extend beyond individual government boundaries and 2) intergovernmental relations in cooperation with local government, as well as state and federal agencies. (Regional Traffic Crash Summary Statistics 1997)
  http://wzsafety.tamu.edu/

    This Clearinghouse, a cooperative partnership between the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA), provides a centralized resource for information related to work zone safety.  It is being operated by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. 


http://www.ptrcers.demon.co.uk/

    PTRC is the primary European organisation dedicated to the support of professionals concerned with transport, highways and planning, through the dissemination and discussion of recent developments in both policy and practice, and of research findings. PTRC is the leading provider of training and related services to the international transport community.
  http://durp.soc.hawaii.edu/rtsa/

    The Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Hawaii entered into a formal international agreement to provide research and technical assistance with the Road Traffic Safety Association. The Road Traffic Safety Association is the principal traffic safety research and educational institution in Korea.




http://www.liikenneturva.fi/central.htm

    The Central Organization for Traffic Safety in Finland (LIIKENNETURVA) is a national expert organization aiming at improving road safety by influencing people’s traffic behaviour and values and attitudes concerning traffic throughout society. The means for achieving the goal are publicity and education. The target groups for these are all road users, particularly the people and organizations specifically concerned with traffic matters.


More information concerning Traffic Safety can be found in the Urban Mobility library and headline module. For example:

  • Cross section of rural roads
  • Practical Applications of Traffic Engineering Principles
  • The Implementation of road safety audit in new zealand