Vulnerable road users (VRUs) include pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, all of whom lack the basic safety protections provided to vehicle occupants by automobiles. Fatality rates for VRUs remain unacceptably high. To meaningfully improve roadway safety for VRUs, it is important to understand the safety problems and domains with the highest potential for improvement based on the factors that...

Electric scooter (or e-scooter) usage continues to expand worldwide with shared, rented, and privately owned devices. While many communities with e-scooter sharing programs have observed social, health, economic, and environmental benefits of enhanced multimodal travel and having more alternatives to vehicle use, these effects are often accompanied by real and perceived safety challenges. BTSCRP W...

Rural roads have a higher risk of fatality or serious injury than urban roads due to factors such as varying terrain, wildlife, and long distances between services. BTSCRP Web-Only Document 4: Highway Safety Behavioral Strategies for Rural Areas , from TRB's Behavioral Transportation Safety Cooperative Research Program, documents the overall research effort that produced  BTSCRP Research Repo...

Work-related traffic crashes remain particularly challenging to address. However, recent research and practice have shown that instilling an awareness of safety and fostering a corporate safety culture supportive of safety may prevent traffic crashes, reduce their frequency, and reduce their severity. The TRB Behavioral Traffic Safety Cooperative Research Program’s BTSCRP Web-Only Document 3: Deve...

Naturalistic driving data extends our understanding of risky teen driving behavior beyond what can be gleaned from crash analyses, in a number of important ways. It offers the potential to examine behavior on a continuous basis, instead of being limited to an event-based ‘snapshot’; and, critically, it provides an objective record of behavior in contrast to the subjective reports of drivers or aft...

While many studies have focused on driver distractions such as cell-phone use, the impact of infrastructure elements on distraction and the extent to which they may cause distraction has not been well studied. Examples include objects that are unusual (such as aesthetic bridges) or confusing (signage or markings) or that require an unusual amount of time to locate (like a specific wayfinding sign ...