An Analysis of Teen-Age Driver Crashes 2005-2008 (pdf)

  January 10, 2010      Analytics, Motor Vehicles, Traffic Safety
Brown, D., A. Watkins, CAPS Research Report, Jan. 10, 2010.

This study was conducted at the request of an advocate group that wanted information to assist them in developing public information and education countermeasuers for teen-age drivers. While most past CAPS studies of youth-involved drivers were limited to 16-20 year olds, the advocate group was also interested in 15 year olds, and they were not interested in 20 year olds since their projects were oriented around teen drivers. Several studies were conducted, including CARE IMPACT studies that compared 15, 16-19 and 15-19 year old causal drivers with causal drivers in the older age group.

CARE Driver Distractions Study (pdf)

  November 21, 2009      Motor Vehicles, Traffic Safety
Brown, D., CAPS Research Report, Nov. 21, 2009.

This was a recent report requested to provide information for the Distracted Driver Summit held at UAB on December 3, 2009. A variety of driver distraction causes are discussed and compared.

HIT: A GIS-Based Hotspot Identification Taxonomy

  June 1, 2009      Analytics, Motor Vehicles, Traffic Safety
Steil, D. and A. Parrish; International Journal of Computers and Their Applications, to appear, 2009.

The authors have developed a Hotspot Identification Taxonomy (HIT) that organizes the various methods for viewing hotspots. Basically they are defined as follow:

  • First order - high crash frequency road segments possibly filtered for specific event(s);
  • Second order - road segments defined as those that have high event counts specifically related to a countermeasure under consideration (e.g., selective enforcement for the speed event);
  • Third order - segments having a high frequency of countermeasure-related events and for which the countermeasure was historically effective.
Effective use of the HIT model required four interrelated activities: data-collection, linear hotspot identification, presentation and assessment.

A Review of Youth-Alcohol Traffic Crashes in Alabama During CY 2007 (pdf)

  January 15, 2009      Law Enforcement, Motor Vehicles, Traffic Safety
Brown, D., A. Watkins, CAPS Research Report, Jan. 15, 2009.

As part of their youth-alcohol program, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs requested a special study to focus on the development of Youth-DUI countermeasures. This report is in three sections. The first is a summary of recommended countermeasures in prioritized order based upon estimated cost-benefit. The recommendations are based upon the detailed analysis performed for Alabama and reviews of potential countermeasures given in the literature. The second and third sections of this report provide the detailed data analysis that was originally performed for the State of Alabama for CY (calendar year) 2003. These have been updated using CY 2007 data.

A Host Architecture for Automobile License Plate Recognition

  May 1, 2008      Law Enforcement, Motor Vehicles
Mitchell, M, M. Hudnall, D. Brown, D. Cordes, R. Smith, A. Parrish, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics 2008 (ISI 2008), New Brunswick, NJ, May 2008.

The objective of this paper was to present an architecture that supports data transmission and data sharing among applications related to commodity tag recognition systems. These systems are used extensively in Great Britain and other countries to recognize automobile license plates and to notify security officials of suspicious activity or trafficking by known suspects. This architecture was tested in a successful pilot project.