Home » Careers, Research Opportunities and Internships

TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH

General
Associated Center
Associated Faculty

Selected Research Profiles

• Understanding traffic/commuter relationships. . .
  
  Traffic accident statistics are a significant factor in evaluating the safety of our roads and highways, yet many factors affect road conditions at any given time. Recent studies into the relationship between traffic volumes and highway accidents have found that the customary means of including traffic volumes in safety analysis - dividing the number of crashes over a time period by the number of vehicle-miles (or vehicle-kilometers) traveled during the same time period - is too generalized to capture all of the variation in the occurrence of highway accidents. Dr. John Ivan seeks to improve the accuracy of these assessment techniques. One problem, for example, is the failure of standard techniques to account for the relationship between the number of crashes during a specific time of day and the prevailing vehicular flow rate at that time. Standard techniques also ignore how the relationship between the prevailing flow rate and the number of crashes varies at different times of the day. In his research, Dr. Ivan seeks to understand what are appropriate measures of exposure to transportation incidents; what measures of exposure can be used to answer the most common questions asked by the public, the media, and policy-makers; and which alternative measures of exposure offer the best fit for statistical modeling of incident rates.
  
  
• Highway congestion and suburban sprawl: linking transportation and land use planning...