602 resultados para Road Lighting Costs.


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Common method variance (CMV) has received little attention within the field of road safety research despite a heavy reliance on self-report data. Two surveys were completed by 214 motorists over a two-month period, allowing associations between social desirability and key road safety variables and relationships between scales across the two survey waves to be examined. Social desirability was found to have a strong negative correlation with the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ) sub-scales as well as age, but not with crashes and offences. Drivers who scored higher on the social desirability scale were also less likely to report aberrant driving behaviours as measured by the DBQ. Controlling for social desirability did not substantially alter the predictive relationship between the DBQ and the crash and offences variables. The strength of the correlations within and between the two waves were also compared with the results strongly suggesting that effects associated with CMV were present. Identification of CMV would be enhanced by the replication of this study with a larger sample size and comparing self-report data with official sources.

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Collisions between different types of road users at intersections form a substantial component of the road toll. This paper presents an analysis of driver, cyclist, motorcyclist and pedestrian behaviour at intersections that involved the application of an integrated suite of ergonomics methods, the Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) framework, to on-road study data. EAST was used to analyse behaviour at three intersections using data derived from an on-road study of driver, cyclist, motorcyclist and pedestrian behaviour. The analysis shows the differences in behaviour and cognition across the different road user groups and pinpoints instances where this may be creating conflicts between different road users. The role of intersection design in creating these differences in behaviour and resulting conflicts is discussed. It is concluded that currently intersections are not designed in a way that supports behaviour across the four forms of road user studied. Interventions designed to improve intersection safety are discussed.

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Portable water-filled barriers (PWFB) are roadside structures used to enhance safety at roadside work-zones. Ideally, a PWFB system is expected to protect persons and objects behind it and redirect the errant vehicle. The performance criteria of a road safety barrier system are (i) redirection of the vehicle after impact and (ii) lateral deflection within allowable limits. Since its inception, the PWFB has received criticism due to its underperformance compared to the heavier portable concrete barrier. A new generation composite high energy absorbing road safety barrier was recently developed by the authors.

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Existing research and best practice were utilized to develop the Project Management, Stakeholder Engagement and Change Facilitation (PSC) approach to road safety infrastructure projects. Two case studies involving Queensland Transport and Main Roads demonstrated that use of the PSC has potential to create synergies for projects undertaken by multi-disciplinary road safety groups, and to complement Safe System projects and philosophy. The case studies were the North West Road Safety Alliance project, and the implementation of Road Safety Audit policy, and utilised a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods including interviews and surveys.

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Recent modelling of socio-economic costs by the Australian railway industry in 2010 has estimated the cost of level crossing accidents to exceed AU$116 million annually. To better understand the causal factors of these accidents, a video analytics application is being developed to automatically detect near-miss incidents using forward facing videos from trains. As near-miss events occur more frequently than collisions, by detecting these occurrences there will be more safety data available for analysis. The application that is being developed will improve the objectivity of near-miss reporting by providing quantitative data about the position of vehicles at level crossings through the automatic analysis of video footage. In this paper we present a novel method for detecting near-miss occurrences at railway level crossings from video data of trains. Our system detects and localizes vehicles at railway level crossings. It also detects the position of railways to calculate the distance of the detected vehicles to the railway centerline. The system logs the information about the position of the vehicles and railway centerline into a database for further analysis by the safety data recording and analysis system, to determine whether or not the event is a near-miss. We present preliminary results of our system on a dataset of videos taken from a train that passed through 14 railway level crossings. We demonstrate the robustness of our system by showing the results of our system on day and night videos.

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Injury is the leading cause of death among young people (AIHW, 2008). A primary contributing factor to injury among adolescents is risk taking behaviour, including road related risks such as risky bicycle and motorcycle use and riding with dangerous or drink-drivers. Injury rates increase dramatically throughout adolescence, at the same time as adolescents are becoming more involved in risk taking behaviour. Also throughout this period, adolescents‟ connectedness to school is decreasing (Monahan, Oesterle & Hawkins, 2010; Whitlock, 2004). School connectedness refers to „the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school‟ (Goodenow, 1993, p. 80), and has been repeatedly shown to be a critical protective factor in adolescent development. For example, school connectedness has been shown to be associated with decreased risk taking behaviour, including violence and alcohol and other drug use (e.g., Resnick et al., 1997), as well as with decreased transport risk taking and vehicle related injuries (Chapman et al., accepted April 2011). This project involved the pilot evaluation of a school connectedness intervention (a professional development program for teachers) to reduce adolescent risk taking behaviour and injury. This intervention has been developed for use as a component of the Skills for Preventing Injury in Youth (SPIY) curriculum based injury prevention program for early adolescents. The objectives of this research were to: 1. Implement a trial School Connectedness intervention (professional development program for teachers) in ACT high schools, and evaluate using comparison high schools. 2. Determine whether the School Connectedness program impacts on adolescent risk taking behaviour and associated injuries (particularly transport risks and injuries). 3. Evaluate the process effectiveness of the School Connectedness program.

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Background Situational driving factors, including fatigue, distraction, inattention and monotony, are recognised killers in Australia, contributing to an estimated 40% of fatal crashes and 34% of all crashes . More often than not the main contributing factor is identified as fatigue, yet poor driving performance has been found to emerge early in monotonous conditions, independent of fatigue symptoms and time on task. This early emergence suggests an important role for monotony. However, much road safety research suggests that monotony is solely a task characteristic that directly causes fatigue and associated symptoms and there remains an absence of consistent evidence explaining the relationship. Objectives We report an experimental study designed to disentangle the characteristics and effects of monotony from those associated with fatigue. Specifically, we examined whether poor driving performance associated with hypovigilance emerges as a consequence of monotony, independent of fatigue. We also examined whether monotony is a multidimensional construct, determined by environmental characteristics and/or task demands that independently moderate sustained attention and associated driving performance. Method Using a driving simulator, participants completed four, 40 minute driving scenarios. The scenarios varied in the degree of monotony as determined by the degree of variation in road design (e.g., straight roads vs. curves) and/or road side scenery. Fatigue, as well as a number of other factors known to moderate vigilance and driving performance, was controlled for. To track changes across time, driving performance was assessed in five minute time periods using a range of behavioural, subjective and physiological measures, including steering wheel movements, lane positioning, electroencephalograms, skin conductance, and oculomotor activity. Results Results indicate that driving performance is worse in monotonous driving conditions characterised by low variability in road design. Critically, performance decrements associated with monotony emerge very early, suggesting monotony effects operate independent of fatigue. Conclusion Monotony is a multi-dimensional construct where, in a driving context, roads containing low variability in design are monotonous and those high in variability are non-monotonous. Importantly, low variability in road side scenery does not appear to exacerbate monotony or associated poor performance. However, high variability in road side scenery can act as a distraction and impair sustained attention and poor performance when driving on monotonous roads. Furthermore, high sensation seekers seem to be more susceptible to distraction when driving on monotonous roads. Implications of our results for the relationship between monotony and fatigue, and the possible construct-specific detection methods in a road safety context, will be discussed.

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This report documents research that was commissioned in order to review the materials used in the Road Ready program for relevancy and acceptability to the target audiences as part of the implementation of the ACT Road Safety Strategy Action Plan. Relevant literature on young driver crash risk and best practice principles in driver education was reviewed as a first step (Section 2). The evidence for effectiveness of driver education programs in Australia was summarised (Section 3) and a separate review of the use of incentives in relation to driver education was performed. The brief called for an expert review of the materials and delivery design for both the Road Ready and Road Ready Plus programs. This is reported in Section 5, along with the overall recommendations for program improvement. More specific comments on individual modules in the Road Ready program are listed at the end of Section 5. Lastly, feedback from stakeholders, specifically the facilitators and teachers of the programs, as well as former students who have completed the Road Ready program, was sought. Interviews and surveys were conducted with these groups. Summaries of the methods and findings are contained in Section 6.

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The Haddon Matrix was developed in the 1960s road safety arena, and has since been used in many public health settings. The literature and two specific case studies are reviewed to describe the background to the Haddon Matrix, identify how it has been critiqued and developed over time and practical applications in the work-related road safety context. Haddon’s original focus on the road, vehicle and driver has been extended and applied to include organisational safety culture, journey management and wider issues in society that affect occupational drivers and the communities in which they work. The paper shows that the Haddon Matrix has been applied in many projects and contexts. Practical work-related road safety applications include providing a comprehensive systems-based safety management framework to inform strategy. It has also been used to structure the review or gap analysis of current programs and processes, identify and develop prevention measures and as a tool for effective post-event investigations.

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In this paper we propose the hybrid use of illuminant invariant and RGB images to perform image classification of urban scenes despite challenging variation in lighting conditions. Coping with lighting change (and the shadows thereby invoked) is a non-negotiable requirement for long term autonomy using vision. One aspect of this is the ability to reliably classify scene components in the presence of marked and often sudden changes in lighting. This is the focus of this paper. Posed with the task of classifying all parts in a scene from a full colour image, we propose that lighting invariant transforms can reduce the variability of the scene, resulting in a more reliable classification. We leverage the ideas of “data transfer” for classification, beginning with full colour images for obtaining candidate scene-level matches using global image descriptors. This is commonly followed by superpixellevel matching with local features. However, we show that if the RGB images are subjected to an illuminant invariant transform before computing the superpixel-level features, classification is significantly more robust to scene illumination effects. The approach is evaluated using three datasets. The first being our own dataset and the second being the KITTI dataset using manually generated ground truth for quantitative analysis. We qualitatively evaluate the method on a third custom dataset over a 750m trajectory.

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The prevalence of leg ulcers of is 0.12%–1.1% and >3,000 lower limb amputations are performed yearly in Australia due to non-healing leg or foot ulcers. Although evidence on leg ulcer management is available, a significant evidence-practice gap exists. To identify current leg ulcer management, a cross-sectional retrospective study was undertaken in Brisbane, Australia. A sample of 104 clients was recruited from a community specialist wound clinic and a tertiary hospital outpatient’s specialist wound clinic. All clients had an ulcer below their knee or on their foot for ≥4 weeks. Data were collected on ulcer care, health service usage and clinical history for the year prior to admission. On admission, participants reported having their ulcer for a median of 25 weeks (range 2-728 weeks); with 51% (53/104) reporting an ulcer duration of ≥24 weeks. Including the wound clinic, participants sought ulcer care from a median of 3 health care providers (range 2-7). General Practitioners provided ulcer care to 82% of participants. Nearly half (42%) had self-cared for their ulcer; 29% (30/104) received treatment by a community nurse. A gap was found between the community-based ulcer care experienced by this population and evidence-based guidelines in regards to assessment, management, advice, and referrals.

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This study investigated whether the night-time conspicuity of road workers can be enhanced by positioning retroreflective strips on the moveable joints in patterns that convey varying degrees of biological motion. Participants were 24 visually normal adults (12 young M = 26.8 years; 12 older M = 72.9 years). Visual acuity, contrast sensitivity and glare sensitivity were recorded for each participant. Experimenters acting as road workers walked in place on a closed road circuit within simulated road work sites, facing either the oncoming driver or the roadway (presenting sideways to the driver) and wearing one of four clothing conditions: (i) standard road worker vest; (ii) standard vest plus thigh-mounted retroreflective strips; (iii) standard vest plus retroreflective strips on ankles and knees; (iv) standard vest plus retroreflective strips positioned on the extremities in a configuration that conveyed biological motion (“biomotion”). As they drove along the closed road participants were instructed to press a button to indicate when they first recognized that a road worker was present. The results demonstrated that regardless of the direction of walking, road workers wearing biomotion clothing were recognized at significantly (p < 0.05) longer distances (3×), relative to the standard vest alone. Response distances were significantly shorter for the older drivers. Contrast sensitivity was a better predictor of the ability to recognize road workers than was visual acuity or glare sensitivity. We conclude that adding retroreflective strips in the biomotion configuration can significantly improve road worker conspicuity regardless of the road worker's orientation and the age of the driver.