Evaluating current and future pedestrian mid-block crossing safety treatments using virtual reality simulation.

Virtual reality (VR) simulation offers a proactive, cost effective, immersive, and low risk platform for studying pedestrian safety. Within immersive virtual environments (IVEs), existing and alternative design conditions and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) technologies can be directly compared, prior to real-world implementation, to assess the impacts alternatives may have on pedestrian safety, perception, and behavior. Environmental factors can be controlled within IVEs so that test trials are replicable and directly comparable.

Rethinking infrastructure design: evaluating pedestrians and VRUs' psychophysiological and behavioral responses to different roadway designs.

The integration of human-centric approaches has gained more attention recently due to more automated systems being introduced into our built environments (buildings, roads, vehicles, etc.), which requires a correct understanding of how humans perceive such systems and respond to them. This paper introduces an Immersive Virtual Environment-based method to evaluate the infrastructure design with psycho-physiological and behavioral responses from the vulnerable road users, especially for pedestrians.

Crash histories, safety perceptions, and attitudes among Virginia bicyclists.

Introduction: Cycling injury and fatality rates are on the rise, yet there exists no comprehensive database for bicycle crash injury data.

Method: Widely used for safety analysis, police crash report datasets are automobile-oriented and widely known to under-report bicycle crashes. This research is one attempt to address gaps in bicycle data in sources like police crash reports.

The effect of crash characteristics on cyclist injuries: An analysis of Virginia automobile-bicycle crash data.

This paper examines bicyclist, automobile driver, vehicle, environmental, and roadway characteristics that influence cyclist injury severity in order to determine which factors should be addressed to mitigate the worst bicyclist injuries. An ordered probit model is used to examine single bicycle-single vehicle crashes from Virginia police crash report data from 2010 to 2014. Five injury severity levels are considered: fatalities, severe injuries, minor or possible injuries, no apparent injuries, and no injury.