Center for Safety Equity in Transportation

rural • isolated • tribal • indigenous

Effects of Tourism on Rural Roads and Rural Delivery with CAV

  • Completed

    CSET Project #: 2002

    Project Funding: UH

  • Start Date: August 2020

    End Date: March 2022

    Budget: $222981.03

Principal Investigator(s)

Panos Prevedouros

Panos D. Prevedouros, PhD is a Professor of Transportation and Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where and he developed and manages UH’s Traffic and Transportation Laboratory. He’s a Subcommittee Chair of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), a unit of the National Academies. Prevedouros is a registered Professional Engineer in the European Union, a Court-qualified Traffic and Transportation Engineering expert in Hawaii and Illinois, and an Envision Sustainability Professional (ENV SP). Prevedouros has expertise in urban road network management, traffic safety including incident management, traffic flow simulation, traffic signal optimization, intelligent transportation systems, demand forecasting and alternatives analysis, sustainable infrastructure including transportation, energy, policies and regulation. As of September 2017, Dr. Prevedouros has published 49 Technical Reports, 48 Academic Journal Papers, 45 Conference Refereed Papers, 35 Proceedings Papers, and co-authored the 2nd and 3rd editions of internationally adopted textbook Transportation Engineering and Planning (Prentice Hall, 1993 and 2001.) He has pioneered effective traffic solutions for Honolulu such as traffic underpasses and reversible flow lanes. He’s also developed a realistic plan for Hawaii’s energy future. He blogs on Hawaii’s infrastructure challenges at fixoahu.blogspot.com.

Guohui Zhang

The PIs has emphasized their research on crash severity formulation, analysis, and mitigation in the transportation program at the University of Hawaii. Zhang has conducted several relevance projects: 1) Alcohol Influenced Driver Injury Severity Mitigation in Intersection-Related Crashes in New Mexico; 2) Exploratory Multinomial Logit Regression Model-based Teenage and Adult Driver Injury Severity Analyses in Rear-End Crashes; and 3) Mixed Logit Model-based Driver Injury Severity Investigations in Single- Vehicle and Multi-Vehicle Crashes on Two-lane Rural Highways. The first project provides valuable insights in driver behavior analysis under the influence of alcohol in intersection-related crashes. Findings of the second project can be beneficial to better understand the difference between teenage and adult drivers, and their specific attributes in rear-end crashes. The third project enhances our understanding of single-vehicle and multi-vehicle involved crashes and advances crash severity research methodology. All these projects would provide solid contributions to the proposed project. The modeling approaches used in those three projects can be helpful to this study. Our experiences and findings from these three projects will make the proposed project start at a higher level. Guided by the USDOT’s priorities to promote the safe, efficient and environmentally sound movement of goods and people, this project will develop crash record database and research findings are helpful for transportation agencies to develop cost-effective solutions to reduce crash severities and improve traffic safety performance in RITI communities. 

Project Summary

In year 4 of CSET we propose to study the following two subjects, both of which have been initiated as student research projects of significance to rural areas in Hawaii (and elsewhere):

  1. Effects of tourism on rural roads: Case study on traffic congestion and parking problems on Oahu’s rural North Shore
  2. Rural delivery with CAV: Development of methodology for analysis and case studies in Hawaii and Washington to assess household budget savings and crash reduction

Both projects directly fulfill CSET’s main objective to improve safety in rural America. The first project involves significant contact with the North Shore community, its political representatives and the Hawaii DOT. The second project addresses rural highway crashes and it involves a specific case study in Hawaii assessing a short-to-medium distance, and another one in Washington State for a medium-to-long distance delivery. Due to their development around specific locations, both projects are directly context-sensitive, but the methodology of analysis is generic and applicable to a variety of locations. The first of the two projects listed above also involves a dimension of climate adaptation because Hawaii DOT has declared that it will only accept mitigations that account for coastal erosion and threats to coastal highways due to climate change/sea level rise.

Project Products

2002_CAV report for CSET_Final

Project News

The UHM project, Effects of Tourism on Rural Road and Rural Delivery with CAV, was referenced and discussed on a PBS Hawai’i Insights program called “The Allure of the Green Sea Turtle.” The program aired on July 8, 2021. https://www.pbshawaii.org/the-allure-of-the-green-sea-turtle/