After the course, students will be able to:
- Recognize and synthesize human-, environment-, traffic-, and infrastructure-related perspectives towards traffic safety
- Discuss and review safety of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists
- Identify geospatial aspects of crashes through spatial analysis approaches such as hotspot analysis and density analysis
- Analyze and predict traffic crashes through descriptive statistics and statistical modeling
- Develop and execute plans and procedures to evaluate effectiveness of countermeasures, conduct before-and-after study, and improve traffic safety.
TThe societal costs of traffic accidents are dramatic. Every year, more than 1 million people are killed in a road crash, and 20 to 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries worldwide. Although the Netherlands is among the safest countries in the world, the societal costs of traffic accidents are still estimated at 2% of GDP (at 17 billion Euro per year, 2018), 4-5 times higher than congestion costs. In the Netherlands, cycling deaths comprise about one-third of all traffic deaths and fatal accidents among elderly cyclists (over-70) have increased by almost 70% between 1999 and 2019.|
This courses presents an introduction to traffic safety from a policy and a research perspectives. The course takes a multidisciplinary approach to traffic safety, integrating engineering, human factors and geographical perspectives. In the course, spatial and statistical analysis is conducted to analyze and predict traffic crashes, and to develop countermeasures to reduce traffic accidents.
The course assignments include 1 individual assignment (a report) with weight 40% and a 1 group assignment (project) (60% weight).
The individual assignment will consist of a report including review of scientific papers and documents in order to briefly discuss advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and perspectives (human factors, environment, and/or infrastructure-related problems, engineering, psychology, administration perspectives) adopted to deal with the traffic safety issues and how to combine these alternative viewpoints. As part of the assignment, students will seek a traffic safety policy devised for another context or country in order to identify lessons that can be learnt from it and discover ways to improve the Dutch Sustainable Safety concept using these lessons.
The group assignment will be an overarching project covering all the learning objectives of the course. In this assignment, student groups (2 students in each group) will be given a case study. In this case study, each group will identify the site specific factors affecting safety, conduct spatial and statistical analysis to assess the problems, and discuss and propose solutions/countermeasures to alleviate the safety problems. Each group will prepare a comprehensive report and a presentation to convey their findings.
Final grade = 40% * grade individual assignment report + 50% * grade group assignment report + 10% * grade group assignment presentation
Requirement: each part sufficient grade (5.5/10).