Pedestrian Observation and Data Collection Curriculum Guide

This is a final report, NITC-ED-999, from the NITC program of TREC at Portland State University, and can be found online at: https://nitc.trec.pdx.edu/research/project/999 The project brief associated with this research can be found at: https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/25833This guidebook provides a comprehensive set of class exercises suitable for students in courses related to travel behavior, traffic safety, urban planning and design, community health, or civil engineering. Exercises include activities developed through this project as well as an extensive set of educational materials drawn from online resources. The exercises developed as part of this project focus on pedestrians. They include elements of both traditional traffic counts and behavioral components, the latter of which are often lacking from current data collections efforts. By encouraging students to consider behavioral interactions of roadway users, these exercises can provide students with field experience that collects data that underlie behavioral traffic theory and agent-based traffic models. The materials are organized to provide helpful guidance to instructors and provide insights gathered through the pilot testing of classroom materials. Activities drawn from existing resources provide a comprehensive set of educational materials that address different facets of pedestrian and bicycle planning. The educational curricula and resources outlined in this guide allow instructors with little or no experience to integrate pedestrian-related curriculum into their teaching. The guide may also prove useful for organizations interested in pedestrian and bicycle planning and provide additional resources for experienced instructors. Included curricula are aimed at undergraduate or graduate university students, but can be easily adaptable to high school students or community college classes interested in exploring these issues. Specific outcomes include the following: • Readings, curriculum, data collections tools, and general research design that instructors can adapt to their needs, while standardizing the data collection method. This can enrich classroom learning and facilitate fieldwork experience. • The data collected from the exercise may provide a benefit to local agencies. Local jurisdictions are often interested in partnering with local university classes on data collection, but time constraints, particularly in the quarter system, can make planning and execution of projects time-prohibitive.This project was funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) under grant number 999. Additional resources in the guide are public documents courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Pedestrian & Bicycle Information Center (PBIC), the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI), Ryan Snyder at the UCLA Department of Urban Planning, and Krista Nordback of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center (UNC-HSRC)

Pedestrian Observation and Data Collection Curriculum Guide

This guidebook provides a comprehensive set of class exercises suitable for students in courses related to travel behavior, traffic safety, urban planning and design, community health, or civil engineering. Exercises include activities developed through this project as well as an extensive set of educational materials drawn from online resources. The exercises developed as part of this project focus on pedestrians. They include elements of both traditional traffic counts and behavioral components, the latter of which are often lacking from current data collections efforts. By encouraging students to consider behavioral interactions of roadway users, these exercises can provide students with field experience that collects data that underlie behavioral traffic theory and agent-based traffic models. The materials are organized to provide helpful guidance to instructors and provide insights gathered through the pilot testing of classroom materials. Activities drawn from existing resources provide a comprehensive set of educational materials that address different facets of pedestrian and bicycle planning. The educational curricula and resources outlined in this guide allow instructors with little or no experience to integrate pedestrian-related curriculum into their teaching. The guide may also prove useful for organizations interested in pedestrian and bicycle planning and provide additional resources for experienced instructors. Included curricula are aimed at undergraduate or graduate university students, but can be easily adaptable to high school students or community college classes interested in exploring these issues. Specific outcomes include the following: • Readings, curriculum, data collections tools, and general research design that instructors can adapt to their needs, while standardizing the data collection method. This can enrich classroom learning and facilitate fieldwork experience. • The data collected from the exercise may provide a benefit to local agencies. Local jurisdictions are often interested in partnering with local university classes on data collection, but time constraints, particularly in the quarter system, can make planning and execution of projects time-prohibitive

Motor-vehicle safety : a 20th century public health achievement

The reduction of the rate of death attributable to motor-vehicle crashes in the United States represents the successful public health response to a great technologic advance of the 20th century-the motorization of America. Six times as many people drive today as in 1925, and the number of motor vehicles in the country has increased 11-fold since then to approximately 215 million. The number of miles traveled in motor vehicles is 10 times higher than in the mid-1920s. Despite this steep increase in motor-vehicle travel, the annual death rate has declined from 18 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 1925 to 1.7 per 100 million VMT in 1997-a 90% decrease.1999992

Identification and safety effects of road user related measures. Deliverable 4.2 of the H2020 project SafetyCube

Safety CaUsation, Benefits and Efficiency (SafetyCube) is a European Commission supported Horizon 2020 project with the objective of developing an innovative road safety Decision Support System (DSS). The DSS will enable policy-makers and stakeholders to select and implement the most appropriate strategies, measures, and cost-effective approaches to reduce casualties of all road user types and all severities. This document is the second deliverable (4.2) of work package 4, which is dedicated to identifying and assessing road safety measures related to road users in terms of their effectiveness. The focus of deliverable 4.2 is on the identification and assessment of countermeasures and describes the corresponding operational procedure and outcomes. Measures which intend to increase road safety of all kind of road user groups have been considered [...continues]

Transportation in Michigan: older adults and caregivers

Michigan Department of Transportationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90963/1/102858.pd

Means-Tested Income Support, Portfolio Choice and Decumulation in Retirement

We investigate the impact of means tested public income transfers on post-retirement decumulation and portfolio choice using theoretical simulations and panel data on Australian Age Pensioners. Means tested public pension payments in Australia have broad coverage and give insight into the incentive responsiveness of well-off, as well as poorer households. Via numerical solutions to a discrete time, finite horizon dynamic programming problem, we simulate the optimal consumption and portfolio allocation strategies for a retired household subject to assets and income tests. Relative to benchmark, means tested households should optimally decumulate faster early in retirement, and choose more risky portfolios. Panel data tests on inferred wealth for pensioner households show evidence of more rapid spending early in retirement. However they also show that better-off households continue to accumulate, even when facing a steeper implicit tax rate on wealth than applies to poorer households. Wealthier households also hold riskier portfolios. Results from tests for Lorenz dominance of the panel wealth distribution show no decrease in wealth inequality over the five years of the study.retirement wealth; life-cycle saving; public pension; portfolio choice

From the Concept of Being “the Boss” to the Idea of Being “a Team”: The Adaptive Co-Pilot as the Enabler for a New Cooperative Framework

The “classical” SAE LoA for automated driving can present several drawbacks, and the SAE-L2 and SAE-L3, in particular, can lead to the so-called “irony of automation”, where the driver is substituted by the artificial system, but is still regarded as a “supervisor” or as a “fallback mechanism”. To overcome this problem, while taking advantage of the latest technology, we regard both human and machine as members of a unique team that share the driving task. Depending on the available resources (in terms of driver’s status, system state, and environment conditions) and considering that they are very dynamic, an adaptive assignment of authority for each member of the team is needed. This is achieved by designing a technology enabler, constituted by the intelligent and adaptive co-pilot. It comprises (1) a lateral shared controller based on NMPC, which applies the authority, (2) an arbitration module based on FIS, which calculates the authority, and (3) a visual HMI, as an enabler of trust in automation decisions and actions. The benefits of such a system are shown in this paper through a comparison of the shared control driving mode, with manual driving (as a baseline) and lane-keeping and lane-centering (as two commercial ADAS). Tests are performed in a use case where support for a distracted driver is given. Quantitative and qualitative results confirm the hypothesis that shared control offers the best balance between performance, safety, and comfort during the driving task.This research was supported by the ECSEL Joint-Undertaking,which funded the PRYSTINE project under the Grant 783190

Expectations and Planning for Future Transportation-Related Mobility in Adults 55-84.

Older adults must balance their needs for mobility with physical or cognitive changes that may reduce driving abilities and potentially increase driving-related risk. Unfortunately, older drivers often avoid planning for possible future mobility needs, despite being inundated with information from many sources. Preliminary qualitative interviews examined drivers’ and other stakeholders’ mental models of the issues involved in driving cessation. While interviewees recognized the need for planning, they also explicitly acknowledged that preparing for future mobility needs was rare and suggested several contextual factors as potentially important factors that influence older adult’s driving decisions. Based on these interviews, a subsequent, quantitative survey examined behaviors and beliefs of middle-aged and older adults from two populations: predominantly Black respondents in Detroit, MI (n=445) and White respondents from the Ann Arbor, MI area (n=134). Overall, the results provide evidence that mobility planning is not a one-size-fits-all solution. For example, mobility planning appears to be as rare among older drivers as among middle-aged drivers, suggesting that mobility planning does not occur spontaneously as people age. However, respondents who had prepared for other future situations (e.g., retirement or healthcare needs) consistently reported more mobility planning as well. In these data, Black/African-American drivers reported more mobility planning than Whites/Caucasians, but it remains unclear whether these differences are due to race, urban context, or other potential differences. The total number of Cues to Action, or events that made people consider changing their driving, also significantly predicted mobility planning. However, regression model findings varied depending on whether mobility planning was measured subjectively versus as a summed score of objective planning behaviors. Taken together, these findings indicate that mobility planning is indeed a multidimensional construct, one clearly associated with drivers’ experiences on and off the road. The dissertation committee is comprised of Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher (chair, Health Behavior and Health Education), Cathleen M Connell (Health Behavior and Health Education), Thomas M. Meuser (extramural member, Gerontology, University of Missouri – St. Louis), and Ruth E. Dunkle (cognate member, Social Work).PHDHealth Behavior & Health EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135776/1/harmonac_1.pd

Safety in Numbers and Bicycle Safety: A Detailed Analysis of the Denver Metropolitan Area

Recently across the US, there has been a push to accommodate and encourage the viability of alternative modes of transportation—especially bicycling. Leaders across all levels of government, trade groups, advocacy and policy groups, and others are promoting different methods to make urban areas more bikeable. Now, as planning practice is moving towards implementing a transportation system that serves different types of travelers, the US faces challenges involved with retrofitting existing automobile-oriented streets. While implementing bicycle safety initiatives is becoming a popular movement among municipalities, there have been differing opinions on the best way to make cities more bikable in academic literature (Pucher & Buehler, 2012). There is an ongoing debate about what types of improvements will be the most effective at reducing crash rates and/or decreasing individual risk for cyclists. Since 2003, one of the key factors in this debate has been the phenomenon of “safety in numbers.” “Safety in numbers,” or SiN, describes the observed inverse correlation between bicycle ridership and cyclist risk (Jacobsen, 2003). As ridership numbers increase, the relative risk per cyclist is said to decrease (all else being equal). When examining large-scale datasets, such as national ridership counts and crash statistics, research suggests there is a significant negative, non-linear correlation (exponentially decreasing) between ridership and crashes per rider. This means that while the total number of crashes increases with ridership, the rate of crashes per rider decreases. While bicycle safety and SiN are well-researched topics, there are still many questions about the SiN effect that are still unclear. First, the full character of the SiN effect is not explicit in the existing literature. Nearly all studies of the phenomenon have been conducted with large units of analysis (cities, countries, etc.). No study to the researcher’s knowledge has considered the SiN effect at the individual street level with real data. Second, because SiN has not been studied with small units, there has not been a way to control for road conditions that also effect bicycle crash rates. And third, it is not clear how all of the factors that determine cyclist injury and fatalities—including SiN, bicycle infrastructure, speed limit, road design, congestion, etc.—interact with one another. These gaps in collective understanding about safety in numbers has led to disagreements among scholars about its nature and implications for practice. One of the major debates surrounding SiN and policy has been its use as an argument to dissuade investment in separated bicycle infrastructure. Some think that separated infrastructure may undermine some of the safety benefits that may affect cyclists because of SiN; the goal of this type of infrastructure is to limit motorists’ conflict points with cyclists, and because of this, separated infrastructure may actually endanger other cyclists on the road because fewer cyclists are interacting with drivers in mixed traffic, lessening drivers’ incentives to adjust their behavior (assuming that behavior modification underlies the SiN effect) (Thompson et al., 2017). Despite limited understanding about this topic, SiN is has been used to make policy justifications, specifically pitting policy-only solutions against infrastructure improvement ones (Bhatia & Wier, 2011; City of Berkeley, 2010). It is crucial, then to understand the SiN effect more fully. My research addresses these gaps in the literature and provides recommendation for practice. My research reports several major findings. First, the safety in numbers effect is reflected on the individual road segment level; using a Cragg double hurdle model, I showed that numbers are a significant predictor of crashes, even when other control variables—infrastructure, congestion measures, speed limit, functional class, median household income, and road length—are added to the model. Second, my research shows that the SiN effect is best characterized by a non-linear, exponentially decreasing mathematical model, even on the segment level. Third, my research created detailed predictions that quantify how the SiN effect changes under different conditions. The most notable of these findings was twofold. First, there was no significant difference in the predicted number of crashes for segments with or without bike lanes as the number of trips increased. And second, facilities with separated bike lanes also receive a safety benefit from increased exposure, but the benefit is not as strong as on segments without separated bike lanes. In summary, my research verified existence of SiN on the road segment level as well as characterizes the effect mathematically. I also suggest that practicing planners should encourage more biking to improve overall road user safety, but that this should be done in tandem with other measures such as bicycle infrastructure