Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-89).

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-125).

Public service announcements (PSA) have been utilized successfully to promote the health behaviors to the public. In spite that Hong Kong government keep increasing the budget of PSA (admanGo, 2015;2016), the effectiveness of PSA is seldom measured. Previous studies focus on testing the discourses, contents, and public's interpretations of PSA (Chan and Huang, 2015; Chan & Chang, 2013; Wong, 2006). Little research tries to explore the design and effectiveness of PSA. Besides, Hong Kong is facing a serious road safety issue due to the rapid development of the economy. And the convenient use of mobile phones causes the public pays less attention to road safety issue. According to the annual report of road safety council (2015), "inattentively" is the primary contributory factor in road accidents both from driver perspective and passenger perspective. A study was designed to investigate the public attitudes and behavior related to road safety and their responses to public service announcements using narrative or fear appeals. Two main theories were utilized to create the theoretical framework for this study: Regulatory fit theory and the Theory of planned behavior. The hedonic principle plays a role in the basic function of RFT and TPB. Both of them aim to change people's behavioral intentions and concerns that people approach pleasure and avoid pain. The core principle in RFT is to examine people's approach and avoidance mechanisms based on the two regulatory focus systems. On the other hand, TPB emphasizes that people's intentions are performed based on the chronic perceptions of the positive or negative outcomes of the recommended behaviors. Once people think the recommended behaviors are favorable, they are more likely to engage, which matches the principle of pleasant and pain from RFT. This study investigates the impact of either focusing on promotion or prevention in the Regulatory fit theory along with fear appeal, which could modify the variables in Theory of planned behavior, by taking road safety as a context. The purpose of this study is to explore whether Regulatory fit theory with fear framing will have merit under several conditions that may influence individuals' emotional responses, behavioral intentions, and information processing. Survey methodology was adopted. A model incorporating variables in RFT and TPB was proposed. A structured questionnaire was designed to include the key constructs in the RFT and TPB. Altogether 523 responses were collected from 30 November 2017 to 24 December 2017, including 106 respondents from the questionnaire in paper form and 481 from the online platform, in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Four types of stimuli were designed to examine the model. Empirical data of this study confirms the high influence of predictors including attitude towards behavior, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms to predict behavior intention. In particular, subjective norms are the highest-level predictor. About the self-regulatory fit, promotion focus predicts more than prevention focus on health communication. What's more, the results showed that perceived relevance is a key factor when people make decisions about a health-related behavior. This study theoretically attempts to extend Regulatory fit theory by adding fear as the emotional variable that tests whether fear is fit/unfit for an individual's regulatory focus, especially in the behavioral health context, which can help practitioners better understand the use of fear appeal along with Regulatory fit theory and how it impacts individuals' health behaviors. Practically, this study explores the theory-driven communication strategy for practitioners. Fear appeal is one of the most common tactics in health communication campaigns, but there is a lack of research to compare the practical impact of fear appeal. For instance, most practitioners prefer to adopt fear appeal rather than emotional appeals or narrative appeals in health promotions, but few empirical studies have verified the benefits of fear appeal from a theory-based perspective. Furthermore, this study seeks to answer some questions in daily health communication in daily life by applying the Regulatory fit theory, such as how different focus-oriented people understand the fear appeals in health messages. The findings of this study will explore some effective message strategies for health communications and marketing practitioners.

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Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death and injury worldwide and in the US. In New York City, there are about 60,000 annual traffic casualties, including over 200 deaths. Area-wide traffic calming can improve traffic safety, pedestrian and cyclist comfort, and quality of life in neighborhoods (Elvik, 2009). This dissertation examines an area-wide traffic calming program, New York City’s “Neighborhood Slow Zones” (NSZs), in terms of environmental justice, traffic safety, and street design. The dissertation consists of three distinct but interrelated empirical studies. The first one asks if the NSZ program furthers environmental justice in New York City. It examines the locations of the 28 zones in terms of minority and low-income areas, as well as the inclusion of these populations in the process that led to the siting of the zones. This chapter concludes that the NSZ program improves environmental justice in New York City, both because the zones are equitably distributed in poor and minority areas, and because the planning process that led to the siting of the zones was inclusive of these populations. The second study examines the effectiveness of the zones at reducing traffic casualties. This analysis uses a quasi-experimental, before and after research design, with a treatment group (the Neighborhood Slow Zones) and a comparison group (similar zones that did not receive the treatment). The analysis does not detect statistically significant reductions in traffic casualties associated with the NSZs. The final empirical uses a policy transfer approach to compare street design in New York City’s 20-mph zones to similar zones in London. London’s “Slow Zones” were found to be effective at preventing traffic casualties (Grundy et al., 2009), and were the inspiration for New York’s Neighborhood Slow Zones. This study analyzes the traffic calming devices transferred from the zones in London to those in New York. While street designs in London’s 20-mph zones included a robust implementation of traffic calming devices, New York’s NSZs had a much more skeletal implementation of these devices. This suggests that the nature of the transfer of street design from London to New York City contributed to the disappointing results of 20-mph zones in the latter city. Despite these findings, I argue that the NSZ program has had partial success.

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The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) is an association of industry representatives, and state, territorial, provincial, and federal government officials in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The CVSA's goal is to improve commercial vehicle safety. The CVSA concentrates its safety focus on three areas; driver, vehicle, and hazardous materials. Since 1981, the CVSA has developed a set of criteria for each of the three areas that define conditions which are so unsafe that a truck and/or driver should not be allowed to operate. These criteria are known as out of service (OOS) criteria. To check the compliance of motor carriers with the CVSA criteria, a series of road side inspections is conducted by state and local governments. If the driver and/or vehicle are found in violation of the CVSA OOS criteria, they are placed "out of service" until the conditions are completely remedied. Due to criteria growth, the CVSA wanted to examine the OOS criteria in the vehicle and hazardous materials areas. This study, focused on the vehicle portion of the OOS criteria, attempted to correlate commercial vehicle defects to commercial vehicle accidents. For a major portion of this project, actual accident reports from six states of the United States were evaluated. The states and reports were selected via a stratified two stage cluster sampling system. The results were used to form estimates of the proportion and number of commercial vehicle accidents in the United States with a mechanical defect as a contributing factor. In addition to the accident report sampling, other sources were used to establish a correlation between vehicle defects and commercial vehicle accidents. They include literature, national databases, and post-crash inspections. Results from this study show that approximately 4.6% of all commercial vehicle accidents have a mechanical defect as a factor contributing to the accident. Of these, brakes (1.66%), tires (0.45%), couplings (0.38%), load securement (0.37%), and wheels (0.33%) accounted for the majority. A comparison was also made between the OSU study results and the information gathered from other sources. A cost factor was also used to rank the accidents. The sampled accidents accrued $22.7 million in damage to people and property. The underlying assumption is vehicle defects that are strongly represented in accidents and accident damage estimates should have a strong representation in the out-of-service criteria. / Graduation date: 1997

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-146).

Road traffic safety has increasingly become in need of educated road safety professionals, as the number of accidents in the World Health Organization member countries exceeds one million. The profession itself is transitioning from experience based decision making to empirical, theoretical and mathematical based solutions. However, road traffic safety is a multidiscipline, crossing over many fields and requiring a high degree of communication between different institutions. There are very few institutions that provide programs in the field; furthermore, they employ traditional lecture-based teaching methods. The traditional teaching environment does not fulfill the educational needs of future traffic safety professionals due to its rigidity and lack of problem solving exercises. An alternative method, namely problem based learning, is recommended as an alternative teaching method in this paper. The thesis is constructed in such a way as to develop a complete road traffic safety educational module at graduate and post graduate level. The theoretical basis on which a road traffic safety module is later built is presented in the first part of the thesis. Major concepts in road traffic safety, as well as problem based learning methods are investigated. In addition, a literature review SWOT analysis based on literature is conducted.The module development consists of establishing the road traffic safety learning goals for each segment in the module, appropriate assessment criteria and group work format. The module contains gradual difficulty level problems, starting from the easiest topic and easiest format (closed ended problem) and ending with the hardest topic and hardest format (open ended problem). The last section employs the SWOT analysis findings in the theoretical section to develop a SWOT analysis of the road traffic safety module presented in the thesis.

There is an increasing demand for reliable wireless communication in embedded real time systems.  Various communication requirements make the development and deployment of applications that rely on the existence of a protocol stack a challenging research and industrial field of activity. Suitable protocol stacks need to be designed and implemented on new hardware platforms and software structures. Applications that exchange packets over a wireless medium have to deal with time constraints, error checks and have to be aware of energy consumption.   PIE (Platform for Intelligent Embedded Systems) is an experimental platform developed at Halmstad University for educational purposes.  It is a robotic vehicle with wireless communication capabilities that can be used to experiment with traffic scenarios where the vehicles communicate in order to cooperate, for example to avoid hazards or to build platoons.   This thesis addresses the design and implementation of a protocol stack suitable for the PIE platform in the area of vehicle alert systems. Requirements include low latencies along with low packet loss ratios.  The thesis addresses also experimenting with reactive objects for programming network software.