Does Displaying Safety Messages on Dynamic Message Signs have Measurable Impacts on Crash Risk?

Transportation agencies have increasingly been using dynamic message signs (DMS) to communicate safety messages in an effort to both increase awareness of important safety issues and to influence driver behavior. Despite their widespread use, evaluations as to potential impacts on driver behavior, and the resultant impacts on traffic crashes, have been very limited. This study addresses this gap in the extant literature and assesses the relationship between traffic crashes and the frequency with which various types of safety messages are displayed. Safety message data were collected from a total of 202 DMS on freeways across the state of Michigan between 2014 and 2018. These data were integrated with traffic volume, roadway geometry, and crash data for segments that were located downstream of each DMS. A series of random parameters negative binomial models were estimated to examine total, speeding-related, and nighttime crashes based on historical messaging data while controlling for other site-specific factors. The results did not show any significant differences with respect to total crashes. Marginal declines in nighttime crashes were observed at locations with more frequent messages related to impaired driving, though these differences were also not statistically significant. Finally, speeding-related crashes were significantly less frequent near DMS that showed higher numbers of messages related to speeding or tailgating. Important issues are highlighted with respect to methodological concerns that arise in the analysis of such data. Field research is warranted to investigate potential impacts on driving behavior at the level of individual drivers.

An Unhelmeted Motorcyclist Not Holding Both Handlebars - A Photographic Idea for Education Presented as an Initial Scoping Study

Introduction: Road safety campaigns in Australia typically have simple, hit home messages with captions overlaid on photos. The Australian stop, revive, survive campaign is well-known, with accompanying photos displaying red fatigued eyes with the words; tired eyes, yawning, driver fatigue: wake up to the signs. Otherwise, the stop, revive, survive is shown with a windy road ahead viewed through a dashboard.Objectives: The aim of this project was to create a helmet safety message utilising a photograph along with several text words alongside.Methods: A photograph taken by Stephen Hilton of a motorcyclist with no helmet, holding one handlebar, was utilised with the words;‘Helmet, Handlebars, Headlights’ overlaid above along with arrows. This safety design was shown to forty persons, in order to obtain brief feedback and comments on whether this had the potential to convey the message about the need for a helmet in particular. The comments were gathered, collated and then common themes were identified.Results and Discussion: Five emerging themes were identified that included; The message is simple and straight to the point, cultural awareness is required, the need to enforce it as law, motor cycle riders think they are invincible and finally respondents were unsure whether it would work. A word cloud was created capturing and highlighting the main words stated in larger font, while words used infrequently were displayed in smaller font.Conclusion: More than half of the respondents questioned thought the idea was simple, straight to the point and hence should work.

Impact of Safety Message Generation Rules on the Awareness of Vulnerable Road Users

In the face of cooperative intelligent transportation systems (C-ITS) advancements, the inclusion of vulnerable road users (VRU), i.e., pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, has just recently become a part of the discussion. Including VRU in C-ITS presents new challenges, most notably the trade-off between the increase in VRU safety and the aggravation in channel congestion resulting from VRU-generated messages. However, previous studies mainly focus on network-related metrics without giving much consideration to VRU safety-related metrics. In this context, we evaluated such a trade-off with a study of motion-based message generation rules for VRU transmissions. The rules were analyzed using theoretical and simulation-based evaluations. In addition to studying the message generation rules using channel load metrics, such as channel busy ratio (CBR) and packet delivery ratio (PDR), we introduced a new metric: the VRU Awareness Probability (VAP). VAP uses the exchange of messages from active VRU to measure the probability of VRU detection by nearby vehicles. Results show that fixed message-filtering mechanisms reduce the overall channel load, but they could negatively impact VRU detection. We established the importance of quantifying the VRU awareness and its inclusion in C-ITS analysis because of its direct impact on VRU safety. We also discussed approaches that include VRU context and dynamism to improve the definition of message generation rules.

Efficient VANET safety message delivery and authenticity with privacy preservation

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) play an essential role in the development of the intelligent transportation system (ITS). VANET supports many types of applications that have strict time constraints. The communication and computational overheads are minimal for these computations and there are many security requirements that should be maintained. We propose an efficient message authentication system with a privacy preservation protocol. This protocol reduces the overall communication and computational overheads. The proposed protocol consists of three main phases: the group registration phase, send/receive messages phase, and the leave/join phase. For cryptography algorithms, we combined symmetric and asymmetric key algorithms. The symmetric key was generated and exchanged without using the Diffie–Hellman (DH) protocol. Furthermore, we used an efficient version of the RSA algorithm called CRT-RSA. The experimental results showed that the computational overhead in the registration phase was significantly reduced by 91.7%. The computational overhead for sending and receiving the non-safety message phase was reduced by 41.2% compared to other existed protocols. Moreover, our results showed that the time required to broadcast a safety and non-safety group message was below 100 ms and 150 ms, respectively. The average computational time of sending and receiving a one-to-one message was also calculated. The proposed protocol was also evaluated with respect to performance and security and was shown to be invulnerable to many security attacks.

A hybrid access method for broadcasting of safety messages in IEEE 802.11p VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) can improve the road safety by transmitting safety-critical messages such as beacons and emergency messages. IEEE 802.11p VANETs have adopted the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism for the multiple access control. The 802.11p media access control (MAC) protocol, however, can not guarantee the reliability of broadcasting data, since the reception of transmitted messages are not acknowledged. Moreover, the backoff scheme of the 802.11p MAC utilizes a fixed-size contention window for safety message broadcasting, which causes high collision probabilities especially in dense environments. In order to improve such drawbacks, we propose a hybrid access method as follows: Nodes are equipped to reserve time slots for the next round of broadcasting, while unoccupied time slots are preserved for those which have emergency needs. In addition, implicit feedbacks are enabled for detecting collisions incurred during random channel accesses in preserved time slots. We devise a mathematical model which optimally controls the parameters of our scheme while minimizes the cost caused by idle channels and collisions. Extensive simulations show that our mechanism can remarkably improve the performance of VANETs in broadcasting of the safety messages.

Highly Reliable MAC Protocol Based on Associative Acknowledgement for Vehicular Network

IEEE 1609/802.11p standard obligates each vehicle to broadcast a periodic basic safety message (BSM). The BSM message comprises a positional and kinematic information of a transmitting vehicle. It also contains emergency information that is to be delivered to all the target receivers. In broadcast communication, however, existing carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) medium access control (MAC) protocol cannot guarantee a high reliability as it suffers from two chronic problems, namely, access collision and hidden terminal interference. To resolve these problems of CSMA MAC, we propose a novel enhancement algorithm called a neighbor association-based MAC (NA-MAC) protocol. NA-MAC utilizes a time division multiple access (TDMA) to distribute channel resource into short time-intervals called slots. Each slot is further divided into three parts to conduct channel sensing, slot acquisition, and data transmission. To avoid a duplicate slot allocation among multiple vehicles, NA-MAC introduces a three-way handshake process during slot acquisition. Our simulation results revealed that NA-MAC improved packet reception ratio (PRR) by 19% and successful transmission by 30% over the reference protocols. In addition, NA-MAC reduced the packet collisions by a factor of 4. Using the real on-board units (OBUs), we conducted an experiment where our protocol outperformed in terms of PRR and average transmission interval by 82% and 49%, respectively.