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CE 509 Highway Safety

3 Credit Hours

Methods to reduce collisions and injuries on highways. Identifying promising locations, choosing appropriate countermeasures, and evaluating past projects. Understanding the institutional context and establishing appropriate highway design standards.

Prerequisite

The prerequisite is an undergraduate course in traffic engineering, such as CE 305. The co-requisite is an undergraduate statistics course, such as ST 370. Students without a moderate background in transportation engineering and statistics may struggle with some aspects of the course.

Course Objectives

By the end of the course students should be able to:

  • Discuss the historical, legal, and political framework of highway safety in the U.S.
  • Describe major problems with current collision data systems and promising new technologies for alleviating those problems.
  • Identify high hazard highway locations.
  • Choose appropriate countermeasures or programs.
  • Evaluate the safety effectiveness of countermeasures or programs.
  • Establish appropriate design and redesign standards for highways.

Textbooks

Highway Safety Manual. (2010). Washington: American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Available when logged into your NCSU account at https://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/record/NCSU4752452

Hauer, E. (2015). The Art of Regression Modeling in Road Safety. Cham: Springer. Available when logged into your NCSU account at https://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/record/NCSU3339766

Hauer, E. (1997). Observational Before-After Studies in Road Safety: Estimating the Effect of Highway and Traffic Engineering Measures on Road Safety. Oxford, U.K.: Pergamon, (Reference – Selected readings will be provided)

Lord, D., X. Qin, and S. Geedipally (2021). Highway Safety Analytics and Modeling. Elsevier.

Available when logged into your NCSU account at https://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/NCSU5414829

Course Requirements

Homework: None (see projects below)

Examinations: Final exam only.

Software Requirements: Any spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel.

Projects: Four required projects are scheduled throughout the semester.

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Updated: 10/31/2022