Safe System Weekly | September 13, 2024
by Russ Martin
Next week, Ryan Klitzsch ; Rachel Chiquoine, PhD ; and myself will be in Anchorage, Alaska for the Alaska DOT’s 2024 Alaska Safe Roadway Behaviors Symposium . If you happen to be in “The Last Frontier,” consider joining us. Also, next week is both National Child Passenger Safety Week , as well as National Roundabouts Week , an opportunity to amplify attention for this lifesaving countermeasure.
NHTSA Proposes Pedestrian Vehicle Safety Standards
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced a new rule to require new vehicles to be physically designed to mitigate head-to-front-hood impacts. NHTSA will be accepting public comment on the proposed rule for 60 days.
?? Much safety progress has been made since the 1970s to protect people inside the vehicle, but not to protect people outside. Popular heavy SUVs, trucks and large vehicles do more damage and make it more difficult to even see pedestrians and other vulnerable road users. There has been much conversation about how vehicles could be redesigned to help address the pedestrian safety crisis, as is already occurring in Europe.
FHWA Administrator Shailen Bhatt Departs
After a year and a half of service, Shailen Bhatt has departed his leadership position at Federal Highway Administration. Bhatt is a former DOT executive in Kentucky, Delaware, and Colorado, as well as an alum of ITS America.
?? Fellow agency NHTSA has been without a confirmed Administrator for most of the last eight years. Staff has filled in in the meantime, but endemic agency leadership gaps can be barriers to safety progress.
NCHRP: Calibration and Development of State-DOT-Specific Safety Performance Functions
This new report helps states more accurately formulate safety performance functions (SPFs) for local conditions by documenting current practices across the U.S.
?? SPFs are mathematical models used to predict the safety performance of roadway facilities, and, commonly, to identify safety problems and assess how well a planned infrastructure feature might improve safety. States can look to this resource for ideas about how they might optimize their own internal SPF practices.
NCHRP: Implementing and Leveraging Machine Learning at State Departments of Transportation
This report includes details on roadway safety applications for machine learning, including classifying crashes by severity, estimating crash frequency and classifying driver behavior.
GHSA 2024 Annual Meeting in Indianapolis
Highway safety community engagement, traffic enforcement, cannabis legalization and new applications for technology and data were all major topics of discussion at this year’s meeting . In addition, there was a tremendous focus on how to integrate other elements of the Safe System Approach in the work of state highway safety agencies, particularly vehicle safety and post-crash care. Finally, in the background for everyone is the next federal transportation reauthorization coming up in a few years which could rewrite many of the rules of for federal highway safety programs.
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Cars Collect Troves of Data about Traffic and Road Hazards. Should They Share It?
As the $20 million grant-funded “Connect the West” program comes online to implement V2X throughout Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, transportation tech providers and safety advocates continue to discuss how to achieve an acceptable level of privacy and security.
“A vehicle can tell us a lot about what’s going on in the roadway,” said Blaine Leonard, a transportation technology engineer at the Utah Department of Transportation. “Maybe it braked really hard, or the windshield wipers are on, or the wheels are slipping. The car anonymously broadcasts to us that blip of data 10 times a second, giving us a constant stream of information.”
New Waymo Report Attests to Positive Safety Gains
The data finds that autonomous driving by Waymo has far few crashes of three types in some areas: fewer airbag deployment, injury, police-reported crashes. The company is planning to publish its findings in peer-reviewed journals this year.
AAAFTS Releases Proceedings from 2024 Safe Mobility Conference
AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety released a detailed summary of presentations and discussion at this March meeting.
Danena Gaines Presents at the TRB International Conference on Women and Gender in Transportation
Danena presented alongside Susan Herbel (retired CS Principal and respected transportation safety pioneer) and Kari Watkins (Associate Professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis) at a plenary session on women's safety research. View the presentations here .
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That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
Send me any updates you'd like me to include next week at [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn.