I-Corps: Models of Commercialization for Transportation Technology and Data Sources

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

Approximately 30,000 people lose their lives in traffic crashes on our nation's roadways with about 300 of these fatalities occurring in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, along with assistance from the federal government, invests nearly $1 billion per year in transportation infrastructure. A portion of these funds are paid to the consultants who design and oversee the construction of the projects. A small, but still significant, portion of the design process is dedicated to assessing pre-build traffic conditions and crash data analyses. This I-Corps team will be merging two pieces of technology they have developed to create an improve platform for managing transportation data. The proposed technology has the potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of such analyses and to reduce the amount of time and cost to conduct the overall design process. This I-Corps team has developed two systems at the University of Massachusetts. The first is the Regional Traveler Information Center (RTIC), an Intelligent Transportation System that collects travel times and traffic volumes in Western Massachusetts using cameras and sensors strategically placed on major arterials and highways. The other is the UMass Safety Data Warehouse that compiles numerous data sets from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. These datasets allow researchers to investigate crash causes, identify high risk demographics and locate crash hot spots. Crash, citation, hospital, death certificate, and roadway inventory data have been linked using advanced statistical methodologies to create a single dataset that allows analysts to consider the comprehensive crash experience; including driver behavior, crash characteristics, roadway environment, and crash outcomes such as injuries and costs. The new platform will provide real time traffic collection and crash data analyses to customers through a web tool. This would be accomplished by expanding the real time traffic collection reach of RTIC, uploading data from RTIC and the UMass Safety Data Warehouse onto a web tool, and building algorithms to automate crash data analyses.