Search results for "Accident"
showing 10 items of 561 documents
Effects of Task-Irrelevant Cars on Judgments of Deceleration and Time-to-Contact During Car-Following
2012
Rear-end collisions represent over 25% of crashes with other moving vehicles (NHTSA, 2005). Factors that potentially contribute to such accidents include a driver’s ability to respond to a lead car’s deceleration and to estimate how much time remains until a collision would occur (DeLucia & Tharanathan, 2009). Prior research (Oberfeld & Hecht, 2008) showed that time-to-contact (TTC) judgments of approaching objects were influenced by task-irrelevant distractor objects. This finding has implications for rear-end collisions when drivers must detect a lead car’s deceleration amidst surrounding cars. However, Oberfeld and Hecht simulated a stationary observer rather than a moving obser…
The Quest for Global Safety
2007
The authors present a systematic study on the factors that have influence on the establishment of the safety conditions ensuring the rise of Global Earthing Systems. Starting from the definition of Global Earthing System given by CENELEC Document HD 637 SI and from the results of the studies done on the last years on the interconnected earthing systems inside MV networks, the paper proposes some directions of deepening on the topic of Global Safety. Some of the themes whom the paper deals with are: the correct definition of proximity, interconnection and quasi-equipotentiality of the earth electrodes belonging to a Global Earthing System; the influence of the presence of HV/MV stations on h…
Rear-view mirror use, driver alertness and road type: An empirical study using EEG measures
2006
Abstract The use of rear-view mirrors has been suggested as a good behavioural indicator of driver alertness in traffic situations (Brookhuis, K. A., De Vries, G., & De Waard, D. (1991). The effects of mobile telephoning on driving performance. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 23 (4), 309–316). In general terms, drivers look in the mirrors to find information and adapt their driving to traffic variations. This paper aims to analyse the links between time variations in alertness—measured from EEG activity data—and the frequency of rear-view mirror use in a group of drivers, both on motorways and conventional roads. The results point to a direct relationship between alertness level and mirro…
Characterizing the "driver DNA" through CAN bus data analysis
2017
People's driving behavior is influenced by different human and environmental factors, and several attempts to characterize it have been proposed. Nowadays, the standardization of the CAN bus and the increase of the electronic components units in modern cars offer a large availability of sensors data that make possible a more reliable and direct characterization of driving styles. In this work, we propose the concept of "Driving DNA" as a way of describing the complexity of driving behavior through a set of individual and easy-to-measure quantities. These quantities are responsible for some aspects of the driver's behavior, just as -- in the metaphor -- genes are responsible for the tracts o…
Safety Climates in Construction Industry: Understanding the Role of Construction Sites and Workgroups
2013
Studies of safety climate in construction revealed a significant positive association between safety climate and various aspects of occupational health and safety. The mechanisms through which this impact operates are still unclear and safety climate is usually studied without considering the complexity of this industry (companies, worksites and groups). The aim of this research is to analyze to what extend there are differences between construction sites and to explore the relations between construction sites’ safety climate and workers’ safety response and to examine how this influence occur considering the workgroups. The safety climate was evaluated using a reduced version of the questi…
Evaluation of the Safety Performance of Turbo Roundabouts by Means of a Potential Accident Rate Mode
2015
Turbo roundabouts are a particular road intersection layout, designed to increase the safety of double-lane roundabouts, while maintaining their excellent capacity. The main feature of this new concept of roundabout is the impossibility to move from one lane to another, provided by physical barriers marking the lanes. The paper shows an application to turbo roundabouts of a potential accident rate model, aiming to evaluate their safety improvement. Themodel is based on the concept of potential conflict: each vehicle involved in a general intersection performs a series of maneuvers which potentially imply a crash, according to the actual traffic. The number of accidents related to each criti…
TRACE and RELAP5 Codes for Beyond Design Accident Condition Simulation in the SPES3 Facility
2012
Code validation on qualified experimental data is a fundamental issue in the design and safety analyses of nuclear power plants. The SPES3 facility is being built at the SIET laboratories for an integral type SMR simulation, in the frame of an R&D program on nuclear fission, funded by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development and led by ENEA. The facility, based on the IRIS reactor design, reproduces the primary, secondary and containment systems with 1:100 volume scale, full elevation and prototypical fluid and thermal-hydraulic conditions. It is suitable to test the plant response to design and beyond design accidents in order to verify the effectiveness of the primary and containm…
How to formulate an accident prediction model for urban intersections.
2009
Several safety prediction models and methods have been developed to eliminate the relationship between the expected accident frequency and various urban intersection geometry and operational attributes. It is generally accepted that accident rates tend to be higher at intersections than on through sections of a road. This is particularly frequent in urban area where roads are characterized by intersections in close succession; moreover, the safe and effective operations of the urban road system can be significantly affected by safety conditions at intersections. In this paper models and methods designed to understand and to predict the accident process at urban intersections are reviewed. I…
Risk Indicators and Road Accident Analysis for the Period 2012–2016
2017
Road accidents are a major societal issue for every country. The purpose of this paper is to assess the number of traffic and road accidents depending on a series of variables (collision mode, road configuration, conditions of occurrence, road category, type of vehicle involved, personal factors, and length of time of the driving license) in Romania from 2012–2016. The analysis of the road accident trend identifies the causes of accidents, road safety performance indicators, and risk indicators. Having these identified data, a framework is proposed for improving the road safety system and reducing accidents. The Romanian Police, the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) in Romania, and the…
Transient response of a TLP-type floating offshore wind turbine under tendon failure conditions
2021
Abstract Among various types of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs), the tension leg platform (TLP) floating wind turbines have relatively small motions due to stiff tendons. Similar to TLP applications in the offshore industry, tendon failure may lead to deteriorated stability and large transient responses, which should be considered as part of accidental limit state (ALS) checks at the design stage of the TLP FOWTs. This paper takes the WindStar TLP system as a representative and investigates the transient effects of one-tendon failure on the system responses. A coupled numerical model is first established using the aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulation tool FAST. Subsequent numerical s…