Compendium Of Traffic Safety Research Projects

This compendium is an annotated bibliography of 10 years worth of behavioral research. It provides a brief description of nearly 200 projects past, present, & on-going in the following areas: alcohol-impaired driving, drug-impaired driving, occupant protection (crash injury, education, surveys), speed & other unsafe driving actions (problem identification, enforcement), pedestrian & bicyclist safety, older drivers (program planning, problem identification, program development), novice & young drivers (problem identification, training development & evaluation, & countermeasures), & other traffic safety research.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA's) Office of Program Development and Evaluation (OPDE) conducts research and evaluation projects dealing with human attitudes, behaviors, and failures (motor vehicle crashes). This compendium is an annotated bibliography of 10-year's worth of behavioral research sponsored by NHTSA and conducted by OPDE. It provides a brief description of nearly two hundred OPDE projects past, present, and on-going. The compendium also includes information on how individual reports can be obtained.

It is possible to eliminate death and serious injury from Canada’s roads. In other jurisdictions, the European Union, centres in the United States, and at least one automotive company aim to achieve comparable results as early as 2020. In Canada, though, citizens must turn their thinking on its head and make road safety a national priority. Since the motor vehicle first went into mass production, the driver has taken most of the blame for its failures. In a world where each person’s safety is dependent on a system in which millions of drivers must drive perfectly over billions of hours behind the wheel, failure on a massive scale has been the result. When we neglect the central role of the motor vehicle as a dangerous consumer product, the result is one of the largest human-made means for physically assaulting human beings. It is time for Canadians to embrace internationally recognized ways of thinking and enter an era in which the motor vehicle by-product of human carnage is relegated to history. No Accident examines problems related to road safety and makes recommendations for the way forward. Topics include types of drivers; human-related driving errors related to fatigue, speed, alcohol, and distraction and roads; pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit; road engineering; motor vehicle regulation; auto safety design; and collision-avoidance technologies such as radar and camera-based sensors on vehicles that prevent crashes. This multi-disciplinary study demystifies the world of road safety and provides a road map for the next twenty years.