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NHTSA

Page history last edited by Frank Broen 10 years, 3 months ago

On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Bullough, John <bulloj@rpi.edu> wrote:

 

> To be fair, NHTSA's purview is vehicle safety and specifically, not

> infrastructure. NHTSA cannot address roundabouts except in the most oblique

> ways (such as whether headlamps provide sufficient visibility for

> roundabouts compared to other intersection types - an area of study I have

> been involved in; see http://papers.sae.org/2012-01-0268/). But they are

> forced to deal with the infrastructure that is dealt them. Some of this may

> change as vehicle-to-infrastructure and the reverse blur the lines between

> vehicles and infrastructure, but there is a virtual wall of separation

> between the Federal Highway Administration which deals directly with

> roadway infrastructure, and NHTSA which deals with the vehicles using that

> infrastructure. It may take some high-level re-organization to break that

> wall down completely.

> Unrelated to roundabouts, this wall of separation can be frustrating to

> deal with because roadway visibility at night, which is the primary theme

> of most of my own research, necessarily involves both roadway and vehicle

> lighting, but the regulatory and commercial basis for these segments is

> totally different and headlight people rarely talk with roadway lighting

> people. As a consequence, visibility from the combination of headlights and

> roadway lighting is sometimes worse than under just one of these systems

> alone. Lighting engineers in both domains are smart people and could make

> this situation better if someone with some regulatory authority could sit

> them in a room until they figured out how to do it. I personally try to

> bring these communities together whenever possible, such as the upcoming

> TRB workshop on adaptive lighting (

> http://pressamp.trb.org/aminteractiveprogram/EventDetails.aspx?ID=28597).

> Roundabouts obviously can change the way we think of both roadway and veh!

>  icle lighting and aside from their obvious safety benefits, provide a

> useful premise to challenge ourselves about when, how and where we should

> use lighting along roads at night.

> John

> --

> John D. Bullough, Ph.D. - bulloj@rpi.edu

> Senior Research Scientist, Adjunct Faculty Member

> Lighting Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

> Tel +1.518.687.7100, Fax +1.518.687.7120, Web www.lrc.rpi.edu/safety

> ________________________________

> From: "TONY Redington" <tonyrvt99@GMAIL.COM>

> To: ROUNDABOUTS@LISTSERV.KSU.EDU

> Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2013 10:00:05 AM

> Subject: NHTSA IVORY TOWER REPORT

> Hi:

> The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration issued a repot

> this week "Traffic Safety for Older People - 5 Year Plan"

> http://www.aashtojournal.org/Documents/December2013/FiveYearPlan.pdf

> which carefully sidesteps infrastructure!  Sort of the ivory tower

> approach to older folks safety on the highway.  "Pedestrian"s do get a

> little space in the 22-page paper.  But certainly is news you will never

> find old folks on bicycles (or apparently accessing public transit

> either)--or at least (whew! I was worried) are there any safety issues for

> these modes!  Certainly none worth planning for apparently.

> Certainly this is a report that give those folks interested in safety for

> older folks using roundabouts and cycle track, a little chuckle for the

> holidays.

> Apparently infrastructure (AARP advocates intersection conversions to

> roundabouts for improved older citizen safety) remains a potato still too

> hot to take out of the oven.

> And these folks are paid with our tax dollars!

>                     Tony

 


John and all:

 

"NHTSA was established by the Highway Safety Act of 1970 and is dedicated

to achieving the highest standards of excellence in motor vehicle and

highway safety. It works daily to help prevent crashes and their attendant

costs, both human and financial." (Their mission statement on the top of

their website page).

 

Will add that the NHTSA report spends a lot of space on the "older" driver

and their relative fragility (i.e., vulnerability to more severe injury in

a given crash versus a younger person).  And, AARP calls for converting

intersections to roundabouts because half the older driver fatalities occur

there versus less than a quarter of younger driver fatalities.  How can

NHTSA not address the rate of roundabout installations!  Trying to be fair

here...

 

               Tony


Hi Tony, I don't disagree at all that NHTSA could (or maybe even should) ha=

ve a position on roundabouts, even if they cannot actually do anything dire=

ctly to encourage their installation. I am aware of at least one report spo=

nsored/published by NHTSA that mentions roundabouts as a crash countermeasu=

re, e.g.:

http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/hs809012.html#roundabouts

 

Such reports are certainly not the equivalent of a full-fledged publicity c=

ampaign, but that may be all we can expect from an agency that is charged w=

ith the vehicle side of things and not the infrastructure side. It could be=

 argued that the division between FHWA and NHTSA is artificial or even detr=

imental to safety overall, but that argument needs to be settled at a highe=

r level than within either NHTSA or FHWA themselves.

 

John

 

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