Skip to main content

PROJECT DETAILS

Project Type
UTRC Research Initiative
Project Dates
04/01/2014 - 12/31/2016
Principal Investigators
Project Status
Complete

Highway Safety has been identified as a very important problem worldwide. It has been found as the second cause of deaths in the world according to the United Nations (2010). In fact, only in the US, the effects of road crashes cost billions of dollars per year. The US Department of Transportation has established highway safety as one of their main priorities in their Action Plan. Several efforts are underway; however, in many states including Puerto Rico, most of the strategies implemented have a reactive or short-term planning approach. Such approach has generated some improvements in the current system, however, a proactive approach is necessary to consider highway safety aspects in the decision making process from the beginning of the generation of planning alternatives. The proposed research project will fit Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) to be used for the incorporation of highway safety in the strategic planning process. These GLMM have several advantages to predict crash rates including that they incorporate not only a set of explanatory variables but also random effects present in the system, which helps to explain possible correlation in the data. Therefore, these types of models offer great versatility in the modeling of crash rates and its related factors