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Title:

Safety Benefits of a Road Departure Crash Warning System

Accession Number:

01100694

Record Type:

Component

Availability:

Transportation Research Board Business Office

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Abstract:

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.

Monograph Accession #:

01084478

Report/Paper Numbers:

08-1656

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Wilson, Bruce H

Pagination:

18p

Publication Date:

2008

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 87th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2008-1-13 to 2008-1-17
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

DVD

Features:

Figures (3) ; References; Tables (3)

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

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2008 Paper #08-1656

Files:

TRIS, TRB

Created Date:

Jan 29 2008 3:59PM