Safety Benefits of a Road Departure Crash Warning System

More than 1.2 million road-departure crashes occur in the United States annually and these crashes often involve collisions with fixed objects or rollovers. According to 2004 statistics, although collisions with fixed objects or rollovers accounted for only 19 percent of all police-reported crashes, they accounted for 43 percent of the fatal crashes. To reduce road-departure crashes, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) allocated funding to develop and evaluate a Roadway Departure Crash Warning System (RDCW), which alerts drivers of impending lane or road departure. The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center carried out an independent evaluation of the RDCW using data collected in a field operational test (FOT). The FOT involved 78 non-professional drivers who each drove an RDCW-equipped vehicle for 25 days. Numerical and video data was collected during the entire FOT, and the independent evaluation assessed the RDCW’s safety benefits, driver acceptance, and performance and capability. Safety benefits analysis, the topic of this paper, revealed that when the RDCW was activated drivers had fewer departure conflicts (close calls). Projections based on the FOT data indicate that with full national deployment and 100 percent system availability, approximately 9,400-74,800 fewer road-departure crashes would occur each year in the United States. With the 55 percent availability observed in the FOT, this reduction would decrease to 5,200 to 41,200 fewer crashes. The results of this test are encouraging and suggest that development of systems with similar capabilities be continued and FOTs of other collision avoidance systems be conducted.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Wilson, Bruce H
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 87th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2008-1-13 to 2008-1-17
• Date: 2008

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 87th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Audible warning devices in vehicles; Crash analysis; Crash characteristics; Crashes; Fatalities; Field tests; Highway safety; Ran off road crashes; Rollover crashes; Statistics; Warning systems
• Uncontrolled Terms: Close calls
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment; I83: Accidents and the Human Factor; I91: Vehicle Design and Safety;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01100694
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 08-1656
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Jun 3 2008 7:32AM