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As the U.S. focuses more on its infrastructure, highway, and road construction, spending is projected to grow to more than $100 billion by 2022. As the number of worksites grows, the danger to workers and drivers navigating these work zones increases too. In 2019, there were 115,000 crashes in work zones, and of that number, 27,000 resulted in injury. Additionally, 762 crashes in work zones resulted in 842 people losing their lives.
Connected vehicles enable the near-real-time collection of automotive data points – known as connected vehicle data(CVD). These data points provide actionable insights for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) engineers tasked with improving road safety. ITS engineers can use CVD to understand the contextual behaviors leading up to, throughout, and after work zones have been set up. These behaviors include, for example, vehicle speed and the prevalence of hard braking events, often an indicator of higher crash potential.
ITS engineers are currently using many different devices to monitor work zone activity, including roadside cameras, mobile phones, CCTV, and other forms of embedded infrastructure. While there is value in capturing data from each of these devices, understanding an entire state’s traffic performance using any of these siloed processes is not timely or cost-effective. By augmenting more traditional data types with CVD, ITS engineers can work with transportation departments to suggest ways to improve work zone safety.
Complementing Current Solutions with CVD to Fill Gaps
Embedded infrastructure provides ITS engineers with the data they need to monitor construction work zone safety in milliseconds. However, installing and maintaining these types of devices is arduous and expensive. Mobile phone data offers large volumes of data, but for it to be most effective, additional applications are necessary to collect, manage, and store the data, which can take weeks to process. CCTV cameras are an effective source of information, as they allow emergency service teams to see what’s happening in work zones quickly. Still, they are expensive to install and difficult to maintain – especially when the need for them in a specific work zone isn’t permanent.
By incorporating CVD, ITS engineers get a more detailed and dynamic view of the roadways they monitor, with better precision and faster transmission, a near-real-time overlay that enhances any data they may already leverage.
Responding with Greater Precision
CVD can show precise information about work zones and safety hazards. For example, the data can identify how frequently safety sensors are activated in specific areas. If the data shows that the sensors are activated in one location more than others, ITS engineers can infer that transportation departments adjust signage and road layouts accordingly to prevent future accidents.
The data sources for ITS engineers responsible for planning work zones outside of interstate highways are limiting, as CCTV cameras, for example, would not be prevalent in less populated locations. CVD provides a comprehensive view of freeways, arterials, and local streets. As connected vehicles are pervasive, CVD provides an excellent source for planning on secondary roads and in rural areas.
Acting Sooner with Faster Transmission
CVD provides real-time insights into how drivers respond to different conditions. For example, the data can show at exactly what point in a line of traffic drivers tend to brake, and when they’re more prone to accelerate. It also shows when and how often drivers switch lanes. Also, once the driver has exited the work zone, CVD provides insight into the detour route, determining whether the diversion was useful or ultimately caused more congestion and safety issues elsewhere. Based on this specific driver behavior, ITS engineers can help transportation departments plan lane alterations more effectively and quickly validate whether they’ve chosen the best way to direct traffic through work zones.
Putting CVD into Perspective
The power of CVD is not a hypothetical concept for improving work zone safety – these insights are already enabling major improvements on our roadways. Purdue University and the Indiana Department of Transportation (DOT) leverage CVD insights to identify locations where there are high numbers of hard braking events that warrant further investigation to determine potential opportunities for improvement.
The CVD showed that cars were backing up far in advance of the work zone itself and its accompanying cautionary signage. This meant that drivers were not expecting a slowdown when they encountered the stopped traffic, thus resulting in hard braking events and crashes. The Indiana DOT deployed a program called “Protect the Queue” in 2020 to increase driver awareness of slow traffic and reduce crashes.
After initial deployment, it was critical to measure if the mitigation efforts were successful in decreasing hard braking events. To do that, the engineers analyzed activity in two separate work zones – one with a warning vehicle purposefully positioned using CVD insights, as well as one without. The number of hard braking events in the work zone with the warning vehicle was reduced by more than half, and one can estimate a similar reduction in crashes.
As a result, the benefit of leveraging CVD for Purdue and the Indiana DOT is twofold. First, the data provides a scalable technique for prioritizing the location of warning vehicles. Second, the CVD provides the ability to measure reductions in hard braking events for each deployment to assess the operational impact and provide agile tactical adjustments.
There is no question that CVD is transforming work zone safety for the better. With access to enhanced data available in near real time, ITS engineers now have the tools they need to make roadways safer, which will ultimately reduce accidents and fatalities, specifically in construction work zones.