Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-130). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-91).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-130). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.E. Materials and Process Engineering)--University of Waikato, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-80)

Thesis (MA (Criminology))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

M.Ing. / The focus of this dissertation is on the evaluation of management in traffic safety, and how it is applied, using the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) as a case study. Road Traffic Management in South Africa is in a state of crisis. The constitution provides for concurrency with respect to road traffic management, however, no mechanism has been implemented for co-operation and coordination. It has been found that the current institutional arrangements are not conducive to co-ordination and rapid interventions. Due to the scarcity of resources and the desire to streamline the institutional arrangements, an innovative model has been developed which will perform road traffic management collectively, the Road Traffic Management Corporation, RTMC. The implementation of the RTMC will require full co-operation and acceptance by all the various departments concerned, from National Government level, through to Provincial levels, and the Local Authorities. Before the Corporation can be implemented, the funding needs to be secured, and the source of the funding must be stable and committed. The implementing of such a corporation will be delicate, and organizational structure needs to be clear to all parties. At this early stage of the RTMC, the methods of management already used by the RTMC need to be compared to proper management principles, to ensure that the RTMC will have the best structure to ensure its success. Any uncertainties or concerns that may exist among those involved at lower levels can be communicated to top-level management implementing the corporation. By conducting an independent, external investigation, any short falls can be identified which may have been over looked previously. This dissertation aims to ensure that the RTMC adheres to the relevant management principles, focussing on the objective of improving road safety. A questionnaire is devised for the National Department of Transport, so that an independent view of the vision of the RTMC can be acquired. The organizational structure proposed by the RTMC is examined and evaluated to determine the relationship, communication channels, functions and responsibilities, which are intended between the various levels of management and stakeholders. The funding of a corporation such as the RTMC is considered, as the source of such funds needs to be secured before the RTMC can be implemented. A preliminary budget prepared for the RTMC is compared to what funding has been made available. The main objective of the RTMC is to improve road safety. Therefore, the process it intends to use is evaluated to determine whether the goals it intends to achieve through this process are realistic. The engineering function required to improve road safety will also be evaluated in terms of what can be done by engineers to improve the safety on South African roads.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (M Eng (Transportation Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Civil Engineering / unrestricted

Conventional road safety models rely on historical crash data. Locations with high crash injury statistics are given primary interventions. However, crash data are subject to errors, under-reportings, inaccuracy, and requires years to get updated, as crash events are infrequent and partly random(Gettman, Pu, Sayed and Shelby, 2008), as well as road conditions might change. With the advances in connected vehicle technologies, vehicles can be used as mobile sensors that collects driver behavior information. And if found correlated with the crash data, the driver behavior indices can act as safety surrogate measures. This dissertation focuses first on presenting an algorithm for mapping a vehicle sensing big dataset to a digital road network, in a metropolitan city, using the accompanied GPS trajectories. This is a challenging task since the data collected from the on-board-diagnostic port of the vehicle is sampled at a low ping rate, adding to that the excess of GPS noise in urban canyons, which makes the map matching problem even harder. Next, a spatial correlation study is presented. It investigates the spatial relationship between the driver behavior indices (i.e. speed parameters, hard braking and hard acceleration) and crashes (crash frequencies and crash rates, normalized with traffic volume). Highways and non-highway roads are bucketed separately. The other focus of this dissertation is developing an injury-prediction network screening model, that provide safety ranking of road intersections. Novel explanatory variables are derived from the telematics data, such as intersection traffic maneuvers and traffic conflicts. The non-linearity between the explanatory variables as well as the spatial dependency between road intersection is also tested.

With the advancement of implementation for a novel traffic control device, the Flashing Yellow Arrow (FYA), agencies across the country have continually sought strategies to improve intersection operations and safety, specifically with respect to the left-turn application. More so, permissive left-turn intervals have been communicated to drivers using several traffic signal indications; however, most frequently these phases are represented through the circular green (CG) ball and more recently, the FYA. Previous research in this area determined that the FYA indication produced the most effective communication of permissive left-turns. Further, this previous research led to the inclusion of the FYA in the 2009 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). In recent years, agencies across the country have embraced the implementation of the FYA for permissive left-turns. However, there remains a lack of national guidance on the definition of change and clearance intervals for transitioning between protected and permissive left-turns. Complicating the matter is the connection between traditional signal phasing/design and human factors. Investigation through driver comprehension and real-world operations will allow us to not only evaluate current conditions, but also experimental and future conditions. Recommendations provided from this research will ultimately offer agencies with the strategies for the most effective transition from a protected left-turn to a permissive left-turn phase.

No description available.