Theory, Explanation, and Prediction in Road Safety: Promising Directions.

摘要

On November 20 and 21, 2008, the FHWA and TRB cosponsored a workshop titled, Future Directions in Highway Crash Data Modeling. FHWAs Office of Safety Research and Development and TRBs Technical Activities Division were responsible for organizing the workshop. They enlisted the help of the Future Directions subcommittee of the TRB Task Force for the Development of a Highway Safety Manual. The subcommittee provided technical input on the workshop agenda and prepared this document. Primary authors from the subcommittee include James Bonneson, Texas Transportation Institute, and John Ivan, University of Connecticut. The objectives of the workshop were (a) to explore promising future directions in highway crash data modeling and (b) to identify potential areas for advanced research to provide a theoretic foundation for explaining crash causation. The focus of the workshop was on the effect of highway infrastructure elements on safety. Goals of the research identified by workshop participants are the further development of science-based safety evaluation and the development of more stable, reliable, and transferrable highway safety predictive models. Twenty-five invited traffic safety researchers and practitioners attended the workshop. Experts in highway safety data analysis were brought together with experts from allied fields (such as epidemiology, public health, and human factors) to share their experiences and methods for quantifying treatment effects. The workshop agenda is provided in Appendix A. Through breakout groups and plenary sessions, the participants were asked to describe critical issues and challenges; explore alternative modeling approaches and concepts; and identify promising new directions for explaining the contributing causes of crashes. This document summarizes the discussion and describes potential areas of advanced safety research identified by the participants.