News Tagged: Safety
5 Entries Tagged
Safety thread runs through sixth Oregon Transportation Summit
What is the highest number of deaths and serious injuries we should accept from our transportation system? For transportation agencies who have long sought to reduce traffic fatalities, a movement to eliminate them completely has gained currency.
This year’s Oregon Transportation Summit brings a strong safety theme, including plenary session and morning and afternoon workshops. Registration for the summit officially opens today.
Register or learn more about the summit, which takes place Monday, Sept. 15.
The 2014 Oregon Transportation Summit opens with a plenary session titled “Envisioning Vision Zero.” Vision Zero is the approach, initiated in Sweden, to not accept deaths or serious injuries as a tradeoff for other goals of the road network. In the United States, a national effort called Toward Zero Deaths grew out of these principles.
Minnesota Toward Zero Deaths has been a leader among state programs, working with partners across jurisdictions and service categories across the state to address roadway deaths and injuries. Sue Groth oversees this effort as the state traffic engineer and director of the Office of Traffic, Safety and Technology for the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
OTREC is pleased to have Groth deliver the summit’s plenary address. Groth will give context on Toward Zero Deaths and describe how this philosophy now guides her department. Alongside Minnesota, Oregon has also identified zero transportation deaths as a core objective in its strategic highway safety plan. The Oregon Department of Transportation’s Safety Division Administrator Troy Costales will follow Groth’s presentation with a response focused on Oregon’s efforts.
Biographies for Groth, Costales and other speakers are at the OTS Speaker Biographies Page.
Tags: jarrett walker, leah treat, minnesota department of transportation, oregon transportation summit, safety, sue groth, toward zero deaths, troy costales, vision zero
PSU student team takes 2nd in Cornell Cup with traffic safety device
Tags: bicycle, bicycling, livability, portland state university, research, safety
OTREC research looks into bus safety performance monitoring and analysis
Tags: bus, metrics, otrec, performance, psu, safety, strathman, transit, trimet
Student engineers plan for a safer Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway
The Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, pegged as one of Portland’s high-crash corridors, already attracted the attention of city officials worried about safety. They got more help from Portland State University students during the recently completed term.
Students from civil engineering professor Christopher Monsere’s transportation safety analysis course formed six groups, each studying a piece of the corridor. They presented their findings and recommendations during the course’s open house March 19. The presentation drew officials from local agencies interested in improving corridor safety, including the city of Portland, the TriMet transit agency and the Metro regional government.
The student work dovetails with the city’s own examination of the highway corridor, completed in February. In some cases, as with the Shattuck Road intersection, the students came to many of the same conclusions as city officials, said Wendy Cawley, traffic safety engineer with the Portland Bureau of Transportation. Both found that narrowing the crossing distance could make that intersection safer for pedestrians.
Tags: chris monsere, portland bureau of transportation, rectangular rapid-flash beacons, road diets, safety, trimet, walking, wendy cawley
Visiting scholar wants zero traffic fatalities
When engineers focus on transportation systems, they often produce brilliant solutions. Sometimes, however, they focus in the wrong place.
“Engineers are really good; if you tell them, ‘This is what we want to accomplish,’ they’ll do it,” said Peter Jacobsen, himself an engineer and a public health consultant. “But traffic safety hasn’t had a good scientific, evidence-based approach that we have in, say, nuclear-power-plant design.”
Jacobsen, Portland State University’s first visiting scholar this school year, will present the Vision Zero concept at Friday’s transportation seminar. Vision Zero resets the goal of transportation systems from reducing total crashes to eliminating fatalities.
“The way engineers currently look at the road system is to look at crashes,” Jacobsen said. “Vision Zero folks say to look at health: not to have fatalities or permanent disabling injuries.”
Designing for health means respecting the limits of the human body. If crossing into oncoming traffic could produce head-on collisions with a greater force than people could survive, then Vision Zero says to separate that traffic. Roundabouts reduce the likelihood of dangerous side-impact collisions.
Vision Zero could have the largest effect closer to home. Jacobsen has pushed for colleagues to consider traffic from a child’s perspective. A residential street that might be perfectly safe for adults could pose many dangers to a child.
Children have trouble identifying the source of a sound, have a narrower field of vision and don’t understand perspective, increasing the likelihood they’ll put themselves in danger, Jacobsen said. “We’re not born at birth with all that stuff hooked up,” he said.
That puts the burden on transportation engineers. “We cannot adapt children to traffic,” he said. “Society needs to adapt traffic to the needs of children.”
Tags: peter jacobsen, roundabouts, safety, vision zero, visiting scholar
Archives
Categories
Filter By University
- Portland State University
- University of Oregon
- Oregon State University
- Oregon Institute of Technology
OTREC's Most Used Tags
active transportation alex bigazzi bicycle bicycle infrastructure bicycling chris monsere design e-bikes electric vehicles emissions hau hagedorn ibpi institute of transportation engineers jennifer dill john macarthur karen dixon kelly clifton livability livemove marc schlossberg metro miguel figliozzi newsletter nico larco nitc oregon department of transportation oregon institute of technology oregon transportation summit otrec portland state university proposals psu public transportation region x research rfp rita robert bertini step sustainable cities initiative transit transportation modeling transportation research board trb trimet university of oregon university of utah utc visiting scholars program walking