TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exporatory Analysis (IDEA) program has released Safety Report 32: Railroad Bridge Inspections for Maintenance and Replacement Prioritization Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Laser Scanning Capabilities. Measuring bridge movement under trains in the field is difficult and expensive because a fixed reference point is not normally available, thus c...

TRB’s Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board has released 18 early access papers addressing safety issues, including: Identification of Site Characteristics for Proactive High-Friction Surface Treatment Site Selection using Sensor-Based, Detailed, Location-Referenced Curve Characteristics Data ( link ) Safety Evaluation of Destination Lighting Treatment at ...

Twenty-seven percent of fatal crashes occur at horizontal curves, although they account for less than 10 percent of public roadway miles. Knowing where horizontal curves are located and their geometric characteristics are key to successfully addressing curve safety issues. Curve information is also essential for accurate placement of warning signs as safety treatment, especially where a curve h...

TRB Special Report 323: In-Service Performance Evaluation of Guardrail End Treatments develops a research design for evaluating the in-service performance of guardrail end treatments and other roadside safety devices and identifies the data required to do so. Given the substantial data requirements and methodological challenges of conducting successful evaluations of particular end treatments, ...

In 2012, Congress gave the U.S. Federal Transit Administration (FTA) the authority to establish a new comprehensive framework to oversee the safety of the country’s public transit systems. As part of that framework, state and local transit agencies are required to engage in safety planning. In the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015, Congress asked the National Academies of Scie...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 515: Practices for Preventing Roadway Departures identifies and summarizes practices being used by state departments of transportation (DOTs) to prevent roadway departure crashes and to identify the data-driven advantages and disadvantages of these practices. More than half of all traffic fatalities result from roadway depart...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) has released a pre-publication, non-edited version of Synthesis 527: Resilience in Transportation Planning, Engineering, Management, Policy, and Administration. The report documents resilience efforts and how they are organized, understood, and implemented within transportation agencies’ core functions and services. Core functions and ...

TRB's Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Research Report 193: Tools and Strategies for Eliminating Assaults Against Transit Operators, Volume 2: User Guide  provides potential countermeasures and strategies to prevent or mitigate assaults against transit operators. The User Guide includes an operator assault risk management toolbox developed to support transit agencies in their ef...

TRB's Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Research Report 193: Tools and Strategies for Eliminating Assaults Against Transit Operators, Volume 1: Research Overview provides the materials and methodology used to produce potential countermeasures and strategies to prevent or mitigate assaults against transit operators. Transit industry policies, practices, and operating procedures related...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released its proceedings of a workshop hosted in January 2018 that explores best practices and lessons learned from other high-risk, high-reliability industries for the benefit of the research community and of citizens, industry practitioners, decision makers, and officials addressing safety in the offshore oil industry. Since th...

TRB's E-Circular 232: Automated Vehicle Symposium 2017: Summary of a Symposium highlights the themes from an event that took place on July 11–13, 2017 in San Francisco, California. The event explored the development, testing, building, and deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs). The 2017 AVS provided the opportunity for communication, collaboration, and information sharing on a wide range of t...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Report 875: Guidance for Evaluating the Safety Impacts of Intersection Sight Distance is a resource for practitioners involved in the planning, design, operations, and traffic safety management of stop-controlled intersections. It provides information on how to estimate the effect of intersection sight distance (ISD) on crash ...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program ( NCHRP) Web-Only Document 228 : Safety Impacts of Intersection Sight Distance documents the methodology and presents the results from NCHRP Research Report 875 : Guidance for Evaluating the Safety Impacts of Intersection Sight Distance. It provides  the underlying research on estimating the safety effects of intersection sight distance (...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that identifies challenges to establishing a real-time system-wide safety assurance (RSSA) system and the high-priority research that should be implemented by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other interested parties in government, industry, and academia to expedite development of suc...

To keep pace with accelerating rate of research distribution, the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board is now publishing articles as soon as they are finalized. The latest papers to be published are as follows: Use of a Laser Diffractometer to Obtain the Particle Size Distribution of Fine-Grained Soils Interstate Speed Profiles Conditioning and Testing Pr...

TRB's E-Circular 229: 10th SHRP 2 Safety Data Symposium: From Analysis to Results explores the October 6, 2017 symposium that served as a forum for the exchange of ideas about uses and methods for the SHRP 2 Safety Data Program and identified lessons learned from working with the data. This symposium focused on safety data analysis, results, and applications to help researchers and practitioner...

The full edition of the September-October 2017 TR News magazine is now available. Transportation systems' resilience is the theme of feature articles in this issue. Authors describe lessons learned in planning, engineering, and operations management with regards to resilience; discuss supply chain business continuity; identify techniques for evacuation and emergency transportation; examine the ...

TRB's Special Report 325: Safely Transporting Hazardous Liquids and Gases in a Changing U.S. Energy Landscape reviews how the pipeline, rail, and barge industries have fared in safely transporting the increased volumes of domestically produced energy liquids and gases. The report, sponsored by TRB, reviews the safety record of the three transportation modes in moving these hazardous shipments a...

TRB Special Report 324: Designing Safety Regulations for High-Hazard Industries, examines key factors relevant to government safety regulators when choosing among regulatory design types, particularly for preventing low-frequency, high consequence events. In such contexts, safety regulations are often scrutinized after an incident, but their effectiveness can be inherently difficult to assess w...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that examines which interventions (programs, systems, and policies) are most promising to prevent injuries and death from alcohol-impaired driving, the barriers to action and approaches to overcome them, and which interventions need to be changed or adopted. This report makes broad-reaching recommendations that ...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that envisions an in-time aviation safety management system (IASMS) that can collect data on the status of aircraft, air traffic management systems, airports, and weather, and then assess the data second by second, minute by minute, and hour by hour to detect or predict elevated risks quickly. Additionally, the ...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Report 869: Estimating the Safety Effects of Work Zone Characteristics and Countermeasures: A Guidebook provides practitioners who develop phasing and staging plans for temporary traffic control through work zones with guidance to evaluate the safety impacts of their plan decisions. There is limited data on work zone crashes a...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) W eb-Only Document 240: Analysis of Work Zone Crash Characteristics and Countermeasures documents the research results of multiple analyses focused on developing an improved understanding of work zone crash characteristics and countermeasure effectiveness used to produce NCHRP Research Report 869 : Estimating the Safety Effects of Work...

TRB’s Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2659 consists of 24 papers that explore statistical methods and safety data, including: Methodology to Backcalculate Individual Speed Data Originally Aggregated by Road Detectors Traffic Conflict–Based Before–After Study with Use of Comparison Groups and the Empirical Bayes Method Developing Macrolevel Colli...

TRB's Transit Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Program Final Report 83: Track Circuit Monitoring Tool Standardization and Deployment at Chicago Transit Authority explores the transformation of a tool used by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority into an independent stand-alone track circuit integrity monitoring system to help identify safety critical failure condit...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) latest Research Topic Highlights explores solutions for roadway tunnels. It summarizes the results of several research projects that has framed the problems and mitigation strategies associated with tunnels. Included are summaries of tunnel inspection, rehabilitation, and preservation; tunnel design; and tunnel safety and security.

The full edition of the July–August 2017  TR News  magazine is now available.  Moving research into practice is the theme of feature articles in this edition. Authors describe today’s successes, present a systematic approach that has proved effective at a state department of transportation, describe federal programs encouraging innovations at the state level, discuss initiatives ...

This annual report presents a summary of progress on investigations conducted as part of the Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (Rail Safety IDEA) program sponsored by the Federal Railroad Administration and overseen by the Transportation Safety IDEA Program Committee. The Rail Safety IDEA program provides funding for projects that promote innovative approaches to improving ...

TRB’s Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2662 consists of 19 papers that explore bicycle transportation, including: Comparing Crowdsourced Near-Miss and Collision Cycling Data and Official Bike Safety Reporting Where Do Bikeshare Bikes Actually Go? Analysis of Capital Bikeshare Trips with GPS Data Bicycle Backlash: Qualitative Examination of Aggres...

A featured article in the September-October issue of the TR News explores the current practices that are used to prepare for and to recover from disruptions quickly, to manage highly varied stakeholder groups, and to strengthen performance after a disruptive event. The article identifies an emerging framework for community resilience governance and decision making before and after disruptions. ...