After the Crash: Post-Collision Travel Behavior and Safety Perceptions

Post-collision travel behavior and effects on road safety perception are not well-understood. To quantify the ways thatcrash-related experiences shape the way individuals think about travel, we conducted four focus group discussions with people who had been involved in a crash or near miss or whose relatives or friends experienced one. Several themes emerged from the discussions. Participants changed their travel behavior after experiencing a collision by modifying their travel mode, travel frequency, trip purposes, or vehicle types. Participants developed an enhanced awareness about potentially unsafe behaviors of other road users and road environments and adopted more cautious attitudes toward their own travel. Many participants experienced long-term stress as a result of the incidents, including fear, behavior modification, or travel avoidance. Participants offered several recommendations, including the need for safer infrastructure, improved road user visibility, a shift in media narratives, educational programs, and policy changes focused on land use and transportation synergies

Traffic Collisions Change How Victims Think About Safety

Traffic safety remains a pressing concern in California. Over the past five years, the state has averaged more than 3,751 reported traffic fatalities annually, with likely more unreported. While policies and research often focus on crash prevention and severity reduction, less is known about how collisions affect individuals’ travel behavior and perceptions of road safety. To better understand these effects, we conducted interviews and focus groups with people who had direct or indirect experience with traffic collisions and near misses. We also spoke with professionals who support collision victims, such as physicians, therapists, faith leaders, and advocacy groups representatives. Discussions focused on perceptions of road safety, transportation mode choices, and travel behavior of someone involved in a traffic collision or near miss before and after the incident

Effects of Road Collisions on the Travel Behavior of Vulnerable Groups:Expert Interview Findings

We interviewed eight subject-matter experts in California in 2023 tounderstand how travel behavior and priorities may change in response to direct experience with road collisions. Expertsrepresented a variety of perspectives, including medical doctors, advocates for active transportation safety, and advocates for people with disabilities. Their diverse specialties enabled us to capture a variety of concerns without triggering emotionally sensitive areas for people who have directly experienced road collisions. These experts identified common themes, including mental stress from the prospect of returning to driving—especially on freeways, lesser incidence of long-term changes in travel modes after experiencing a collision, dependence on others for rides in private vehicles, and changing routes or times of day of travel when traveling independently. These experts also explained how people’s mode choices are also affected by general concerns about collisions in the news more than by specific personal experiences with near misses. Interview subjects’ spoke of more specific concerns as well. These included but were not limited to, bicyclists using sidewalks instead of bike lanes when both are present, feeling stigmatized from using public transit or paratransit after experiencing a collision, and concerns with motorists treating bicyclists badly. These initial interviewsclarify areas of focus and methodology for future qualitative and quantitative studies on the intersection oftransportation safety and travel behavior change, particularly as they involve people who have directly experienced road collisions

Experiences with Autonomous Vehicle in U.S. Cities

This project convened a series of meetings and workshops to prioritize listening to multi-sector stakeholders from local government, advocacy, and industry in US cities where autonomous vehicles are operating. The objective was to listen and learn from all stakeholders, raise issues surrounding accessibility and equity, and to solicit responses. Key findings from the workshops include a consensus across the three sectors on the need for good channels of multi-stakeholder communication, and voices across all sectors agreed on the importance of disability access and serving diverse populations. Many parties, representing voices from all sectors, recognized that federal regulatory activities appear to be moving too slowly. Preventing any roadway incidents is a priority for many stakeholders, and some suggest a playbook for handling day-to-day roadway issues and common standards for first-responder interactions. Disability access is a high priority across all sectors, and there many see nearer term to accommodations for blind, hearing-impaired riders, but the timeline for providing service to people with non-folding wheelchairs is less clear. There is also ongoing debate surrounding the limits of regulatory purview, the role for cities, and how to actualize equitable expansion into rural areas. There is more work to do to advance a multi-sector dialogue around the role for local governments and community-based organizations in shepherding a safe, equitable and sustainable expansion of autonomous vehicles