I was fortunate to be able to attend the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board to present some of our work on Vision Zero in the City of Los Angeles and get a snapshot of other transportation research happening throughout the country. It is probably no surprise to anyone that the hot topic this year was AV technology; it felt as though AV research overshadowed everything else, including Vision Zero, which has been a pretty hot topic in the past couple of years.
Our poster showcased some of the work we have been doing at LADOT in support of Vision Zero, the campaign to reduce the number of traffic deaths. Specifically, we presented our work in improving the process for deploying coneventional safety engineering measures. Within the overall Vision Zero engineering framework, I would categorize this project as ‘doing what we already do, but better.’ Our abstract:
As cities adopt Vision Zero goals to eliminate traffic fatalities, many find they are limited in resources to carry out such an ambitious program. With constraints in time, funding, and staffing, many cities are taking a data-driven approach to reduce fatalities as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT), in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LACDPH), developed a simple—yet powerful—database and analysis tool that now plays a key role in how Los Angeles prioritizes projects, applies for grant funding, and designs for safety on our streets. Moving beyond the macro-level Vision Zero strategy development, this tool provides a more targeted approach to estimating the safety benefit of specific engineering countermeasures. Providing highly customizable queries, the process proposed in this paper can be implemented quickly and applied to improve the work transportation planners and engineers already do on a daily basis, such as apply for grants to fund basic safety improvements.
You can take a look at the poster and paper.
When not presenting, I spent the rest of the time checking out other interesting research / projects occurring throughout the country (and world). Here is a roundup of my favorites:
NYCDOT gave a poster presentation on the left-turn study that was already released earlier this year as a pdf presentation. Even though we were already familiar with the work, this was still one of the best looking posters and one of the (few) relevant posters pertaining to our work in LA. ( paper / poster )
This poster gets the award for most interesting in my book. The presenter showed off what was being done in the Netherlands right now along high-speed arterials: a combination of (1) speed limit reductions at intersections and (2) slightly raised intersections to support the speed reduction. Rather than allowing cars to barrel down these roads once they get the green wave, this combination of engineering and policy forces them to slow down at the approach of each intersection. I was most interested in the idea of a lowered speed limit at intersections, but this probably requires a legislative amendment at the state level to enact. ( paper / poster )
This was a very simple survey that looked at which state crash forms allowed for the researcher to be able to tell whether a bicycle rider was on the sidewalk or not. ( paper / poster )
This poster presented a complete process for collecting, storing, and analyzing crash data. In California, with the SWITRS format, we’ve mostly firgured out the right structure for storing the data. Hopefully we, along with other cities, can improve the data collection process (still using paper, yikes!) and the Vision Zero work in Los Angeles is already focused on the third part, analyzing data. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these topics, but this paper would be useful to anyone who is still trying to wrap his/her head around collision data. ( paper / poster )
This was my favorite research project, even though it didn’t have anything to do with Vision Zero or safety. They basically did an analysis of where all the signals would go out (during the summer months) and installed generators that kicked on automatically on the systems most likely to go out. What was really neat is that you can see on the poster that only a few different areas were having problems, so using the analysis, they were able to find these areas. ( paper / poster )
Perhaps this was my second favorite poster. The researchers used vehicle traces (specifically their variation) to determine the number of lanes for each segment. ( paper / poster )