Applications of Connected Vehicle Technology to Address Issues of School Bus and School Bus Stop Safety

Abstract

An analysis of crash data shows that the number of fatal school bus related crashes has remained nearly constant over the past ten years, despite an increase in available safety-improving technology. One of the main concerns related to school bus safety is the issue of illegally passing a stopped school bus. To improve safety around stopped school buses, this dissertation presents a Concept of Operations for a connected vehicle application to improve safety around stopped school buses using Dedicated Short Range Communication. The focus of this application is to increase awareness of stopped school buses or bus stops that are obscured from the driver's view. An on-road naturalistic driving experiment evaluated driver response to an in-vehicle message to warn drivers that they were approaching a school bus that was stopped around a curve. The dissertation concludes by using microsimulation to evaluate the impact of implementing specialized speed control algorithms to reduce vehicle speeds near bus stops along high speed roads. The simulation evaluated the effect of the reduce speed zone on travel time and emissions when the system was considered as a pre-timed speed limit and also when the system was modeled as a connected vehicle system.