Evaluation of Work Zone Safety Using the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study Data - Volume 2 Description of Research

This report is one of the deliverables for the culmination of several phases of a project, which evaluated driver behavior in work zones using the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) data. This study utilized SHRP2 NDS to evaluate the impact of traffic control devices in reducing driver speed in work zones. The main advantage to the SHPR 2 NDS data is that on-road driver behavior was captured and can be used to evaluate how drivers behave in various situations. The study included four different analyses. The first evaluated where drivers began reacting to various work zone traffic control devices. The second assessed how drivers changed speed upstream to immediately downstream as they encountered various traffic control devices. The third assessed how drivers react when they encounter the back of a queue and the fourth developed speed based on work zone characteristics such as presence of barriers.