MPC Research Reports
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Abstract

Considering traffic safety concerns and challenging driving conditions on Interstate 80 in Wyoming, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) selected an I-80 400-mile freeway corridor as one of the three sites in the United States to develop, test, and deploy a suite of connected vehicle (CV) applications. The Wyoming Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program (WYDOT CV Pilot) utilizes real-time communication technologies to provide warnings and advisories regarding various road conditions to heavy trucks and light vehicle drivers. One of the ultimate goals of this pilot is to alleviate the traffic safety concerns on the I-80 corridor in Wyoming. Hence, the safety performance assessment of the pilot is pivotal for the WYDOT and FHWA strategic goals.

This report provides a new traffic safety perspective for the safety performance evaluation of the WYDOT CV Pilot through advanced statistical modeling, machine learning, data mining applications, safety data visualizations, high-fidelity driving simulator experiments, and traffic microsimulation modeling. To this aim, the procedure and the analytical inference for developing a baseline and analysis, modeling, and simulation (AMS) framework are presented based on using two distinct but complementary approaches: conduct a before/after analysis to explore crash/crash severity causations during CV pre-deployment as a baseline, and the AMS framework in with/without the CV technology to quantify drivers’ behavioral alteration under the effect of various CV applications.

Results unveiled statistically significant real-time traffic-related factors contributing to crash and critical crashes during CV pre-deployment. In the with/without analysis and based on the calibrated and validated AMS framework, the impact of several CV applications was analyzed. These applications included spot weather impact warning (SWIW), distress notification (DN), situational awareness (SA), CV variable speed limit (CV-VSL), work zone warning (WZW), forward collision warning (FCW) and rerouting applications. According to the quantification of drivers’ behavioral alterations under various CV notifications utilizing trajectory-level analyses, results affirmed promising safety effects of CV applications. The surrogate measures of safety analysis in microsimulation modeling indicated an enhanced traffic safety performance under various CV market penetration rates (MPR).

How to Cite

Ahmed, Mohamed, Sherif Gaweesh, and Arash Khoda Bakhshi. Assessing the Effectiveness of the Wyoming Connected Vehicle Pilot Program: New Traffic Safety Research Perspectives, MPC-22-489. North Dakota State University - Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, Fargo: Mountain-Plains Consortium, 2022.