Kimberly Vachal named director of NDSU’s Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute. Vachal will begin as director on November 2. She has been with UGPTI for nearly three decades conducting research focused on agricultural safety and traffic safety. She succeeds Denver Tolliver who is retiring after more than 40 years at NDSU, including 14 years as UGPTI’s director.
This quarter’s newsletter is unofficially centered around Richard Baum’s Inside America’s Opioid Crisis: 12 Hard Lessons for Today’s Drug War. It changed some of my long-held beliefs regarding addiction, expanded on others, and was an excellent road map as to how we got here and where we need to go. This issue also seemed like the perfect opportunity to introduce or re-introduce the Sequential Intercept Model (SIM).
The statewide driver survey provides baseline metrics for the North Dakota Department of Transportation Highway Safety Division and others to use in understanding perceptions and self-reported behaviors related to traffic safety.
Trucks are an important mode of economic connectivity in rural states like North Dakota. Therefore, as changes in traffic volumes and patterns are recognized, it is important to monitor levels and effects of increased safety-related interactions between trucks and passenger vehicles.
Kids on farms and ranches often learn to operate equipment at a young age, but injury statistics show that off-highway vehicles (OHVs), such as four-wheelers and side-by-sides, are among the most dangerous.
