Safety, Operations, and Traffic Engineering Team

About the team:

The Safety, Operations, and Traffic Engineering (SOTE) Team works to enhance the safety and efficiency of travel on Virginia’s roadways. Its program spans highway safety, traffic engineering, intelligent transportation systems, and connected and automated vehicles. Much of the research focuses on improving safety and traffic flow through better management of existing infrastructure, rather than building new capacity.

Typical research topics include:

Safety

• Advanced methods for identifying crash hotspots

• Guidance for diagnosis and countermeasure selection

• Pedestrian and bicycle safety improvements

• Development of safety performance functions

• Analysis and creation of crash modification factors for new treatments

• Roadway lighting strategies

• Safety impacts of connected and automated vehicles

Traffic Engineering

• Evaluation of new traffic control devices (signs/markings) and their influence on driver behavior

• Work zone operations and safety

• Visibility and legibility of traffic controls

• Speed control strategies and policy development

• Traffic monitoring techniques

Operations

• Congestion management strategies

• Intelligent transportation systems

• Traffic signal operations and optimization

• Operational impacts of connected and automated vehicles

• Managed lane strategies

• Incident and emergency management

• Enhancing traveler information methods

• Traffic operations center (TOC) management

• Performance monitoring and reporting

• Use of emerging operations data sets, including crowdsourced big data

• Data collection, analysis, and application

This team is supported by two Research Advisory Committees (RACs):

• The System Operations Research Advisory Committee (SORAC) identifies and sets research needs in system operations, aggressively working to implement recommendations resulting from that research so Virginia’s transportation system operates as efficiently and effectively as possible.
  
  
• The Traffic and Safety Research Advisory Committee (TASRAC) studies the areas of traffic engineering and safety research provides an open forum for discussion of new ideas in these areas.

Current Safety, Operations, and Traffic Engineering Projects

Team Leader

Team Members