Investigating the Relationship Between Driving Patterns and Traffic Safety Using Smartphone-Based Mobile-Sensor Data

About the project:

Traffic safety statistics suggest certain hot spots may have a higher crash occurrence due to geometric features of these locations. However, in many cases the safety risk seems to be an outcome of unsafe driving patterns along the roadway upstream or downstream of the crash location.

Although considerable research correlates safety measures to roadway characteristics and some elements of traffic flow (e.g., annual average daily traffic or average speed), there is sparse literature on the correlation between high-resolution dynamic speed and/or acceleration data and crash risk.

The objective of this study is to identify unsafe driving patterns through the use of mobile-sensor data and to explore the relationship between these driving patterns and the incidence of traffic crashes. Once completed, the models developed in this research can be used to develop surrogate safety metrics that indicate the risk associated with different driving patterns.

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