A BRIDGING ANALYSIS FOR ESTIMATING THE BENEFITS OF ACTIVE SAFETY TECHNOLOGIES

The objective of this project was to develop a methodology for estimating the safety benefits of active safety technology. Accident data, the traditional safety measure, are not sufficient because too great an exposure is required to achieve adequate sample sizes and the events leading to the collision often cannot be determined. Consequently, a method relating pre-collision events to safety is needed. The Traffic Conflicts Technique developed in the United States, Europe, and Canada in the mid-70's to address intersection safety is such a method. Traffic conflicts are near-collision events that are recorded by trained observers. This report describes an extension of the traffic conflicts technique to incorporate continuous measurements of crash margin measures, such as time to collision. This approach asserts that the probability of a collision can be estimated from the frequency of small crash margins. Extreme value theory is offered as a robust statistical method to compare probability levels in the tails of observed distributions of crash margins. The approach is illustrated using headway data from the FOCAS project. A final section describes future work that must be done in order to support application of this methodology to the estimation of the safety benefits of advanced technology.

• Corporate Authors:

  University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute

  2901 Baxter Road
  Ann Arbor, MI  United States  48109-2150

  National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

  Office of Crash Avoidance Research, 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Campbell, K L
  • Joksch, H C
  • Green, P E
• Publication Date: 1996-4

Language

• English

Media Info

• Pagination: 32 p.

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Active safety systems; Near crashes; Near midair crashes; Research; Safety; Technological innovations; Traffic conflicts
• Old TRIS Terms: Near-collisions; Safety research
• Subject Areas: Highways; Research; Safety and Human Factors; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00739838
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: UMTRI-96-18, Final Report, HS-042 225
• Contract Numbers: DTNH22-93-D-07000
• Files: HSL, TRIS, USDOT
• Created Date: Aug 7 1997 12:00AM