This project addresses a high-priority need of state highway agencies to reduce the number of fatalities on curves. The innovation proposed here is an enhanced method to enable transportation agencies to cost effectively and safely conduct the network-level curve safety assessment. The method will establish a new intra-agency, crowdsourced data collection framework by leveraging agencies’ existing vehicles and transportation engineers; it uses low-cost mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) for collecting multiple runs of sensing data, including GPS data, accelerations, and gyroscope data; and it collects mobile device sensing data while transportation engineers are undertaking other tasks. The proposed method leverages our previously developed algorithms and methods that extract detailed curve geometrical information, determine BBI, compute superelevation and advisory speed by analyzing the collected GPS data, accelerations, magnetometers, gyroscope data.

Status

Work has been initiated. The Stage 1 Report is expected in February 2024.