Browsing by Author "Robinson, Sarah"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    E-Scooter Safety Assessment and Campus Deployment Planning
    White, Elizabeth; Mollenhauer, Michael A.; Robinson, Sarah; Novotny, Adam (Safe-D University Transportation Center, 2023-12)
    E-Scooters are a popular new service that provide last mile transportation, but there are reports of safety concerns for riders and impingement on other users of rights of way. Little formal research has been conducted on E-Scooter safety or the optimal approach to deployment to decrease nuisance issues. To address this, VTTI and Spin deployed a fleet of E-Scooters on the Virginia Tech campus through an exclusive, controlled research program. Through on-scooter data acquisition systems, fixed infrastructure cameras, anecdotal injury reports, and surveys, data was collected to assess safety impact as well as to understand beneficial and problematic user behaviors and patterns for subsequent countermeasure development and deployment recommendations. The resulting naturalistic dataset includes over 9,000 miles of riding data. Overall, the E-Scooter deployment on the Virginia Tech campus was safer than other reported deployments. The operational constraints that were put in place were largely effective, and with the additional results from this study, some additional constraints and expanded outreach programs may make future deployments even safer. The campus community largely considered the deployment of E-Scooters a clean alternative transportation option and viewed the service favorably.
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    Equity in Transportation Safety
    Robinson, Sarah; Medina, Alejandra; Gibbons, Ron; Kassing, Andrew; Myers, Bradley (National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence, 2024-09-24)
    Equity in transportation is a key issue for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), as well as state departments of transportation. Equitable transportation ensures safety for all road users across all modes of transportation for all communities. FHWA recommends the adoption and equitable application of a safe system approach to achieve Vision Zero objectives to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries. A safe system fundamentally recognizes human error and accounts for it when designing systems and operations. Incorporating equity into roadway safety data is critical for conducting data-driven safety analysis. FHWA recommends collaboration with underserved communities through a process of collecting and analyzing data, engaging community representatives, implementing improvements, and evaluating impacts. Ensuring robust and accurate data is critical. State programs have worked to incorporate a wide variety of data into their crash models. Social and demographic data such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, education, employment status, income level, disability status, among many other variables, have been evaluated and demonstrated to be factors in the frequency of crashes. States have published mapping tools to visualize data trends and identify locations for targeted implementation efforts in conjunction with scoring metrics for evaluating proposed solutions.
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    Introduction to Communications in Transportation
    Mollenhauer, Michael A.; Robinson, Sarah; Vilela, Jean Paul Talledo; Vaughn, Will (Safe-D National UTC, 2022-10)
    As new Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication technology and protocols continue to emerge, additional training is needed for personnel working in the transportation sector. The Virginia Department of Transportation has already created a training program focusing on general topics pertaining to connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) and has recently identified a need for a more specific program focusing on communication technologies. To address this need, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute team developed a 60-minute online learning program that includes a series of 10 narrated modules with slides, images, charts, videos, and learning assessments. The training provides a high-level overview of the types of communications that support ITS, traffic management, and connected vehicle environments. The training includes descriptions of the communication technologies, protocols, performance metrics, use cases, and data security. The included communication technologies are currently being utilized by infrastructure owner-operators (IOOs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and industry technology providers.
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    What factors contribute to e-scooter crashes: A first look using a naturalistic riding approach
    White, Elizabeth; Guo, Feng; Han, Shu; Mollenhauer, Michael A.; Broaddus, Andrea; Sweeney, Ted; Robinson, Sarah; Novotny, Adam; Buehler, Ralph (Elsevier, 2023-06)
    Introduction: Shared dockless electric scooters (e-scooters) are a popular shared mobility service providing an accessible last-mile transportation option in urban and campus environments. However, city and campus stakeholders may hesitate to introduce these scooters due to safety concerns. While prior e-scooter safety studies have collected injury data from hospitals or riding data under controlled or naturalistic conditions, these datasets are limited and did not identify risk factors associated with e-scooter riding safety. To address this gap in e-scooter safety research, this study collected the largest naturalistic e-scooter dataset to date and quantified the safety risks associated with behavioral, infrastructure, and environmental factors. Method: A fleet of 200 e-scooters was deployed on Virginia Tech’s campus in Blacksburg, VA for a 6-month period. Fifty were equipped with a unique onboard data acquisition system, using sensors and video to capture e-scooter trips in their entirety. The resulting dataset consisted of 3,500 hours of data spanning over 8,500 trips. Algorithms were developed to identify safety critical events (SCEs) in the dataset and analyses were conducted to determine the prevalence of various SCE risk factors and associated odds ratios. Results: Results from this study indicate that infrastructure-related factors, behavior of e-scooter riders and other actors, and environmental factors all contributed to the SCE risk for e-scooter riders in Virginia Tech’s pedestrian-dense campus environment. Conclusions: To help mitigate unsafe rider behavior, educational outreach programs should quantify the significant risks associated with infrastructure, behavioral, and environmental risk factors and provide clear recommendations to riders. Improved infrastructure maintenance and design may also improve safety for e-scooter riders. Practical Applications: The infrastructure, behavioral, and environmental risk factors quantified in this study can be applied by e-scooter service providers, municipalities, and campus administrators to develop mitigation strategies to reduce the safety risks associated with e-scooter deployments in the future.