Grants and Contracts per year
Grants and Contracts Details
Description
The basic premise of a properly designed roadway is to consider the capacity and safety issues
while addressing its physical and human environmental needs. To achieve a balance among the
various goals, trade offs maybe needed. Design speed is a fundamental element in roadway
design: a fact that had been underscored in the 2001 Policy for Geometric Design of Highways
and Streets (Green Book) where it is now considered as a choice that determines the various
geometric components (1). The desire to establish a design speed that is consistent with driver
expectations and travel desires has been stressed as an important factor for determining this
choice. Therefore, the relationship between operating and design speeds is a very important
element in the design process. Often times, roadway designs rely on signing to enforce lower
operating speeds while the roadway geometries encourage travel at higher speeds. The concept of
designing selected roadways in a manner that will encourage drivers to operate at the desirable
speeds has been recently revisited. This represents a roadway design philosophy that relies on the
roadway design elements to encourage driving at the intended operating speeds. However, there
is little knowledge of what design elements can effectively influence driver behavior and thus the
drivers' choice of operating speeds.
The objective of this research is to identify such design elements that could influence drivers:
operating speeds and establish the potential magnitude of their influence. Virtual Reality
simulations and video will be employed and drivers will be observed to evaluate the influence of
these elements on their driving behavior. This work could be considered as pioneering the
concept of design that could develop roadways where design speed will match the intended
operating speed.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 5/15/04 → 9/30/09 |
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Projects
- 1 Finished
-
Academy for Community Transportation Innovation
Crabtree, J., Hartman, D. & Toussaint, P.
7/1/02 → 6/30/12
Project: Research project