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Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of teen fatalities. A Teen Driver Support System (TDSS) was developed by the ITS Institute that can allow parents to accurately monitor their teen's driving behavior in relation to known risk factors and Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) provisions. The TDSS, based on a teen's smart phone, provides real-time, contextual in-vehicle feedback to the teen about his or her driving behavior and helps parents monitor certain known risk factors. The system does not allow incoming or outgoing phone calls (except 911) or texting while driving. Feedback to the teen driver includes visual and auditory warnings about speeding, excessive maneuvers (e.g., hard braking, cornering), and stop sign violations. The TDSS prototype also monitors seat belt use and detects the presence of passengers (e.g., based on GDL provisions), two known factors that increase the risk of fatalities among teen drivers. The TDSS can also be programmed to monitor driving during the GDL curfew or a curfew set by parents. A usability review of the prototype TDSS using 30 parent-teen dyads from Washington Country, MN, found that teens and parents held favorable opinions about most of the TDSS functions. Teens and parents both felt that use of the system early in licensure may result in the adoption of safer driving habits even after the system is removed from the vehicle. Several recommendations to improve the system's usability are made based on the results.

This project evaluated Minnesota Department of Public Safety's (Mn/DPS) Operation NightCAP (Concentrated Alcohol Patrol) Program. This overtime enforcement program uses saturation patrols to identify impaired drivers. The project consisted of 3 tasks: a crash data analysis, a driver survey and an officer survey. The crash analysis indicated that saturation patrols have a marginally statistically significant effect on the decrease in fatal and severeinjury alcohol-related crashes rates in Minnesota. The effect of a single saturation is small (~0.1%), indicating that many patrols would be needed to see significant decreases in alcohol-related crash rates. A survey of 5000 Minnesota drivers in 6 counties resulted in 838 completed surveys. Approximately 19% of Minnesota drivers are aware of the Program. Drivers' beliefs about impaired driving influenced their perception of alcohol-enforcement programs and their choices to drive after drinking. Fourteen Program Coordinators and 86 law enforcement officers from the Program also responded to a survey and shared their perceptions about the Program's effectiveness. Main conclusions drawn from the surveys were that saturation patrols are not highly visible to the public and the current Program advertising is not very effective in communities where it is active. Main recommendations are to improve patrol visibility and associated advertising.

Report #4 in the series: Developing Intersection Decision Support Solutions. This report describes the human factors basis for an intersection decision support (IDS) system intended to improve the safety of rural intersections in Minnesota's Interregional Corridors (IRCs). The purpose of the human factors effort is to understand the task of rural intersection negotiation, identify high-risk user groups, describe the human factors that contribute to intersection accidents, and determine what conceptual types of information to present in the IDS display to improve driver performance and safety. Consistent with the original infrastructure consortium proposal, this report emphasizes gaps, older drivers, and rural thru-STOP intersections (Donath & Shankwitz, 2001). This is because older drivers have a high accident risk at rural thru-STOP intersections and problems with gap detection, perception, and acceptance are contributing factors. A task analysis of rural thru-STOP negotiation was used to define the informational requirements for an IDS system for assisting with gap detection, perception and judgment. An abstraction hierarchy defined the operator (driver) constraints relevant to an infrastructure-based IDS system. Four design concepts were constructed and tested in a driving simulator with older (55+) and younger (20-40) drivers in day and night driving conditions. Two designs resulted in the largest mean gap acceptance across groups when compared to baseline. The two design concepts also were most favored by the majority of participants.

Report #6 in the series: Developing Intersection Decision Support Solutions. Minnesota joined with California, Virginia, and the FHWA in a pooled fund consortium (the Infrastructure Consortium) dedicated to improving intersection safety. The Minnesota team's objective is to develop effective strategies to mitigate high crash rates at rural intersections. Rural Intersection Decision Support (IDS) focuses on enhancing the driver's ability to successfully negotiate rural intersections. The system uses sensing and communication technology to identify safe gaps in traffic on a high-speed rural expressway and communicate this information to drivers waiting to enter the intersection from a minor intersecting road. The goal of this system is to improve safety without introducing traffic signals, which on high-speed rural roads often lead to an increase in rear-end crashes. The Rural IDS research program achieved four main research results: an analysis of rural expressway intersections, including development of a technique to identify those with higher-than-expected crash rates; development of a statistical model that can be used to estimate the benefits of deploying IDS at a specific rural intersection; design and implementation of a rural intersection surveillance and data acquisition system capable of quantifying the behavior of drivers; and a task analysis, design study, and simulator-based evaluation of Driver Infrastructure Interface (DII) concepts for communicating relevant information to stopped drivers.

In the United States it is recognized that crashes in rural areas are a cause for concern, especially crashes at rural intersections where inherent speeds may be associated with higher fatality rates (FHWA, 2004). Recent work has shown gap acceptance problems to be the key factor contributing to these crashes (Laberge, et al., 2006) as opposed to stop sign violation (Preston & Storm, 2003). However, the majority of intersection decision-support systems implemented at intersections have not attempted to provide specific information about the nature of available gaps in the approaching traffic or information that supports a driver’s gap acceptance decision. In light of this, to reduce the crash risk at rural stop-controlled intersections, it has been recommended that intersection decision-support systems to assist drivers in responding to safe gaps be developed and deployed (Preston, Storm, Donath, & Shankwitz, 2004). The Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance System-Stop Sign Assist (CICAS-SSA) is an infrastructurebased driver support system that is to improve gap acceptance at rural stop-controlled intersections. The SSA system will track vehicle locations on the major road and then display messages to the driver on the minor road. The primary goal of the current work was to evaluate several candidate CICAS-SSA concepts in order to identify a single sign that may provide the greatest utility in terms of driver performance and usability at a real-world rural intersection. A secondary goal of the current work was to determine the ideal physical characteristics (i.e., location and rotation of a sign relative to drivers) of the candidate CICAS-SSA at a test intersection to maximize comprehension (and subsequent use) of the sign.