Two crash analytics and modeling group members in the Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s (TTI’s) Center for Transportation Safety published the 1st edition of Highway Safety Analytics and Modeling Feb. 25, 2021, on Elsevier’s publisher platform. Texas A&M University Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor and TTI-affiliated Dominique Lord and TTI Research Engineer Srinivas Geedipally are co-authors along with Xiao Qin, director of The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation. The book is geared toward engineers, policymakers, researchers, analysts, and designers (as well as graduate students) in the transportation safety field.
Highway Safety Analytics and Modeling is intended as a resource for transportation engineers and policymakers who work with highway safety data. The book helps readers walk through the decision-making process — whether that’s for an engineering or policy decision — from gathering and sorting data to building models and evaluating results. The book’s chapters deconstruct challenges an engineer or policymaker might encounter when working with crash data and set out possible solutions and well-researched methods to assist with navigating through those challenges.
Book topics include:
- fundamentals and data collection,
- crash-frequency modeling,
- crash-severity modeling,
- cross-sectional and panel studies in safety,
- identification of hazardous sites,
- models for spatial data and
- data mining and machine learning techniques.
Highway Safety Analytics and Modeling provides readers with a better understanding of how to best use highway safety data to create countermeasures, policies and programs that decrease traffic crash frequency and severity. Examples and case studies for the models and methods offer real-world applications that make it easier to see how the models and methods might fit into an engineer’s or policymaker’s evaluative process. For readers who work best in a digital environment, online data, examples and solutions provide a seamless way to try out the book’s suggestions regarding what safety interventions might work in specific situations.
On the book’s Elsevier page, Lord says, “Highway Safety Analytics and Modeling comprehensively covers the key elements needed to make effective transportation engineering and policy decisions based on highway safety data analysis in a single reference.”