Center for Safety Equity in Transportation
rural • isolated • tribal • indigenous
rural • isolated • tribal • indigenous
CSET Project #: 1704
Project Funding: CSET and UW
Start Date: September 2017
End Date: May 2019
Budget: $300,000
Yinhai Wang
Dr. Yinhai Wang is a professor in transportation engineering and the founding director of the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at the University of Washington (UW). He also serves as director for Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), USDOT University Transportation Center for Federal Region 10 and visiting chair for the Traffic Information and Control Department at Harbin Institute of Technology. He has a Ph.D. in transportation engineering from the University of Tokyo (1998), a master's degree in computer science from the UW, and another master’s degree in construction management (1991) and a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering (1989) from Tsinghua University in China. Dr. Wang’s active research fields include traffic sensing, e-science of transportation, big-data analytics, traffic operations and simulation, smart urban mobility, transportation safety, etc. He has published over 120 peer reviewed journal articles and delivered more than 130 invited talks and nearly 220 other academic presentations.
Dr. Wang serves as a member of the Transportation Information Systems and Technology Committee and Highway Capacity and Quality of Service Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). He is currently a member of the steering committee for the IEEE Smart Cities and an elected governor for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Transportation and Development Institute (T&DI), scheduled to serve as president of ASCE T&DI in 2018. He is a co-chair of the Third IEEE International Smart Cities Conference to be held in Wuxi China in 2017 and the ASCE International Conference on Transportation and Development to be held in Indianapolis in 2018. He was a principal investigator for 75 important research projects with a total amount of funding over 51 million dollars. Additionally, Dr. Wang is associate editor for three journals: Journal of ITS, Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, and Journal of Transportation Engineering. He was the winner of the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering Best Paper Award for 2003.
Ziqiang Zeng
Dr. Ziqiang Zeng is a Research Associate in transportation engineering at the University of Washington (UW). He has a Ph.D. in management science and engineering from Sichuan University (2014) and a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from Sichuan University (2009). He was also a Visiting Ph.D. Student at University of Florida from 2012 to 2013. Dr. Zeng’s active research fields include large-scale transportation system modeling and analysis, uncertain multistage decision-making theory, intelligent transportation systems, and traffic safety. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers in international journals and conferences, and co-authored 2 books.
Dr. Zeng served as a general secretary of the International Conference on Management Sciences and Engineering Management (ICMSEM) from 2009-2011 and as an area editor for the 17th COTA Conference International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP2017). He is currently an associate member of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a member of ASCE Transportation & Development Institute, a member of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and a member of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society.
The rural, isolated, tribal, or indigenous (RITI) communities in Washington State include twenty-nine federally recognized Tribes. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data from 2002 through 2011 shows the traffic fatality rate for Native Americans is 3.9 times higher than for non-Native Americans in Washington. Two-thirds of Native American pedestrian fatalities within Washington boundaries occurred in rural areas. However, existing databases in Washington State are incomplete for RITI communities.
As a result, it is critical to develop a data-driven safety related analytical platform to investigate the risk factors and safety status associated with RITI communities. Without high-quality data and data management systems, RITI communities are not eligible to receive funding for safety improvements. It is necessary to build up the comprehensive data infrastructure to enhance the ability to develop informed data-driven plans and mitigation strategies. To address this gap, this project aims to develop a regional multi-source database system for traffic safety data management and analysis of RITI communities in Washington State. This research effort will gather and leverage existing traffic accident databases within the Washington State and develop a database system to dynamically retrieve rural traffic crash data and graphically visualize the data for crash attribute analysis.