Time for a road trip. You punch the destination into your GPS and choose the suggested route. But is this shortest route the safest? Not necessarily, according to Texas A&M University researchers.
Dr. Dominique Lord and Dr. Soheil Sohrabi, with the help of funding from the A.P. and Florence Wiley Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M, designed a study to examine the safety of navigational tools. Comparing the safest and shortest routes between five metropolitan areas in Texas — Dallas–Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, Houston and Bryan–College Station — including more than 29,000 road segments, they found that taking a route with an 8% reduction in travel time could increase the risk of being in a crash by 23%.