OIVS

• April 27th, 2015
• in

The goal of the Alabama Online Insurance Verification System (OIVS) was to create an effective method for implementing the Mandatory Liability Insurance (MLI) law that became effective on January 1, 2013. Development was a joint effort of CAPS and the Alabama Department of Revenue (ADOR) in FY2013.

OIVS includes a management portal and complete back-end infrastructure to support the new requirements of the law, including a role-based online portal for end-to-end management of the MLI process. It implemented a case management infrastructure so that all MLI case correspondences (calls, payments, images, etc.) are now being appropriately logged and retrieved. Citizens can now go online and respond to MLI issues that they have.

We continue to maintain, secure, and expand (as needed) the back-end servers, network, and security appliances that host various ADOR applications in order to provide a reliable, secure and redundant data storage and web infrastructure for ADOR.

CAPS has provided marketing campaigns to raise awareness about the forthcoming changes to the Mandatory Liability Insurance laws, chiefly the development and deployment of the Online Insurance Verification System (OIVS) and the enforcement mechanisms that will be put in place as a result.

MVTRIP

• April 27th, 2015
• in

The Motor Vehicle Title, Registration, and Insurance Portal (MVTRIP) system was developed for the Alabama Department of Revenue (ADOR) in the FY2013 time frame. MVTRIP implemented the next evolution of Alabama’s vehicle titling system.  

Implementation meant the roll out of a new vehicle registration system that replaced the existing system and supported the addition of state and local government tags. MVTRIP provides the overall means of accessing the registration and title data that extended to user authentication and the generation of statistical access and records searches. 

MVTRIP is integrated with a Mandatory Licensing Insurance (MLI) verification component called OIVS.  Capabilities were also extended to:

• dealer licensing
• unclaimed vehicles
• scrap vehicle disposition
• personalized tag reservations
• document imaging

CARE

• March 19th, 2014
• in

An Analysis of Teen-Age Driver Crashes 2005-2008

• January 10th, 2010
• in

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

• November 21st, 2009
• in

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 1st, 2009
• in

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

• January 15th, 2009
• in

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 1st, 2008
• in

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.

Identifying High Frequency Crash Locations: Empowering End-Users with GIS Capabilities

• January 1st, 2007
• in

This paper presented the status of CARE with emphasis on its newly created GIS capabilities as of January, 2007. Emphasis is placed on the following aspects of the CARE/GIS system:

• The timeliness of the data and the use of temporal analysis to track changes over time;
• The ability to create filters using GIS and use them within the CARE analytical engines;
• The integration of demographic GIS layers for schools, hospitals, bridges, census data; roadway inventory, railroads, etc.;
• The extension of the desktop system to a Web-based system.

Several additional innovations have been made to CARE since early 2007, and those interested are urged to review the CARE pages within this site.

Improved Variable and Value Ranking Techniques for Mining Categorical Traffic Accident Data

• December 1st, 2005
• in

This paper reviews the use of two new metrics for the process of assessing the significance of attributes in a database when two subsets of the data are compared. Traditional statistical techniques are useful, and the sample size in public safety databases usually allows the normal approximation to the binomial distribution to be used in comparing proportionate values. For example, the comparison of the proportion of alcohol related crashes on Saturdays would show an very highly significantly higher proportion than that for non-alcohol related crashes. However the new metrics go a step further than this in that they provide a clear intuitive grasp to the user as to exactly how much more is occurring, not in terms of proportions but in terms of number of crashes (for the traffic safety example). The metric is called Maximum Gain, and it measures directly the number of crashes over and above that which is typically expected. This provides a clear indication to the user of just what the potential gain is by applying a countermeasure related to the attribute (e.g., applying selective enforcement on Saturdays). It is not realistic to think that this gain would include all of the crashes for the attribute value; rather, it is realistic to view the maximum gain to be the total over-represented amount.