Pedestrians and bicyclists are overrepresented in fatalities on US roads. Yet, at any given intersection, a pedestrian- or bicycle-involved crash is still relatively rare such that practitioners struggle to understand the contributing factors.
Current practice requires between three and five years of before and after crash data to evaluate the effectiveness of safety countermeasures. Pennsylvania DOT recently developed a new framework using conflicts, or near misses, which will allow a similar evaluation to be conducted in a matter of months. The framework takes advantage of video analytics to automatically identify conflicts, allowing engineers to focus their time on developing solutions rather than reviewing video.
Shannon Warchol is an Associate Engineer for Kittelson & Associates, a full-service transportation firm. She uses her background in applied research to help state and federal clients to develop policy and guidance solutions for operations and multimodal safety, with a special focus on intersections. Shannon combines her knowledge of traffic engineering and research methods to design experiments answering today’s pressing questions. Armed with the results, she then works with state and local clients to implement useful solutions to practical problems. Shannon has led projects investigating flashing yellow arrows, leading pedestrian intervals, alternative intersections, multimodal signal timing, signal performance measures, and video monitoring of bicycle/pedestrian/vehicle conflicts. Shannon is a member of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Roundabouts and Other Intersection Design and Control Strategies as well as the City Transportation Issues Coordinating Council. TRB is the transportation arm of the National Academies. She graduated from Notre Dame in 2013 and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania