Using microscopic video data measures for driver behavior analysis during adverse winter weather:opportunities and challenges

This paper presents a driver behavior analysis using microscopic video data measures including vehicle speed, lane-changing ratio, and time to collision. An analytical framework was developed to evaluate the effect of adverse winter weather conditions on highway driving behavior based on automated （computer） and manual methods. The research was conducted through two case studies. The first case study was conducted to evaluate the feasibility of applying an au- tomated approach to extracting driver behavior data based on 15 video recordings obtained in the winter 2013 at three dif- ferent locations on the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto, Canada. A comparison was made between the automated approach and manual approach, and issues in collecting data using the automated approach under winter conditions were identified. The second case study was based on high quality data collected in the winter 2014, at a location on Highway 25 in Montreal, Canada. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the automated analytical framework in analyzing driver behavior, as well as evaluating the impact of adverse winter weather conditions on driver behavior. This approach could be applied to evaluate winter maintenance strategies and crash risk on highways during adverse winter weather conditions.

Injury severity analysis： comparison of multilevel logistic regression models and effects of collision data aggregation

This paper describes an empirical study aiming at identifying the main differences between different logistic regression models and collision data aggregation methods that are commonly applied in road safety literature for modeling collision severity. In particular, the research compares three popular multilevel logistic models （i.e., sequential binary logit models, ordered logit models, and multinomial logit models） as well as three data aggregation methods （i.e., occupant based, vehicle based, and collision based）. Six years of collision data （2001-2006） from 31 highway routes from across the province of Ontario, Canada were used for this analysis. It was found that a multilevel multinomial logit model has the best fit to the data than the other two models while the results obtained from occupant-based data are more reliable than those from vehicle- and collision-based data. More importantly, while generally consistent in terms of factors that were found to be significant between different models and data aggregation methods, the effect size of each factor differ sub- stantially, which could have significant implications forevaluating the effects of different safety-related policies and countermeasures.