Research:

Start date: 01/2004
Project Status: Completed
Research Area: Transportation Safety and Traffic Flow
Topics: Rural Transportation , Safety , Traffic Operations

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Toward A Multi-State Consensus on Rural Intersection Decision Support

Principal Investigator:

Max Donath, Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Co-Investigator:

Craig Shankwitz, Director, Intelligent Vehicles Lab, Mechanical Engineering

Project Summary:

The intersection decision support (IDS) research project was originally sponsored by a consortium of states (Minnesota, California, and Virginia) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), whose objective was to improve intersection safety. The Minnesota team's focus was to develop a better understanding of the causes of crashes at rural unsignalized intersections and then develop a technology solution to address the cause(s). In the study mentioned above, a review of Minnesota's rural crash records and past research identified poor driver gap selection as a major contributing cause of rural intersection crashes. Consequently, the design of the rural IDS technology has focused on enhancing the driver's ability to successfully negotiate rural intersections by communicating information about the available gaps in the traffic stream to the driver. In order to develop an IDS technology that has the potential to be nationally deployed, the regional differences at rural intersections must first be understood. Only then can a universal solution be designed and evaluated. To achieve this goal of national consensus and deployment, the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Department of Transportation initiated a state pooled-fund study in which nine states are cooperating in intersection-crash research, and collecting data on driver behavior at selected intersections in participating states.