UGPTI Hosts Transportation Week Luncheon

Nearly 40 people attended the National Transportation Week Luncheon sponsored by the Mountain Plains Consortium at NDSU on May 20.

The annual luncheon, held during National Transportation Week, is an opportunity for researchers across campus and transportation professionals across the area to celebrate transportation advances and share ideas, says Denver Tolliver, MPC director.

David Huft, director of the South Dakota Department of Transportation's Office of Research, was the keynote speaker. Huft outlined SDDOT's research program and highlighted the department's approach and philosophy toward research. He said future transportation in South Dakota will focus on reducing travel times, improving the capacity of the transportation system and safety. "All of those areas will need to be balanced with environmental concerns," he said.

Registered guests included faculty from five academic departments representing three colleges at NDSU. There were also representatives from the South Dakota Department of Transportation, the North Dakota Department of Transportation, the Fargo-Moorhead Council of Governments and three out-of-state universities.

TSSC Adds Driver Performance to Safety Inspection Criteria

A new tool is being developed by UGPTI's Transportation Safety Systems Center (TSSC) to help commercial vehicle enforcement agencies identify potentially unsafe drivers.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and State inspection agencies nationwide use the Inspection Selection System (developed by TSSC) to focus inspections on commercial vehicles with poor safety records. The system, in use nationwide since 1995, assigns an inspection value based on past inspections and safety performance of the carrier. Vehicles and drivers of carriers with high inspection values are singled out for more stringent and frequent inspections.

"The current system includes limited driver data, but its main emphasis is vehicle-related violations," says Brenda Lantz, TSSC director. "In research we examined driver convictions for moving violations — the kind that show up on your driver's license record." In the study, researchers linked data from the Commercial Driver's License Information System to employing motor carriers. "It was no surprise that we found that motor carriers that hired less-safe drivers had worse safety records," Lantz says.

Based on that effort, researchers and software designers at the TSSC began looking for ways to integrate the driving records of drivers into the Inspection Selection System.

"Research indicates that driver-related factors are the main cause of most commercial vehicle related crashes," Lantz says. "We want to provide a greater concentration on the commercial driver with the goal of reducing the number of crashes, ultimately reducing property damage, preventing injuries, and saving lives."

Researchers first had to determine how much emphasis to give the driving record data. Does it have more of an influence on overall truck safety than equipment or other violations? To what degree?

Next they needed to integrate the information into the current Inspection Selection System. They've completed this and will be field-testing the modified system in at least five states in the coming year. "We're selecting states with the highest number of commercial vehicle crashes, states that are willing to test the new software on their hand-held computers and states willing to test the software with their electronic screening systems - systems that automatically select vehicles for inspection based on pre-selected criteria. The work is expected to be complete in 2005."

"This has been an exciting project, because we are able to conduct the research and then implement and test it in a real-world setting," Lantz says. The study grew out of a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration effort in 2000 to identify technology and techniques to improve safety in the coming decade.