Recent Center Highlights

HSRC provides resources to AV educators

Navigating the sea of new information on Autonomous Vehicles can be overwhelming. To streamline this, Senior Human Factors Researcher Michael Clamann has designed a curriculum for collegiate teachers, faculty and instructors to use in their own Automated Vehicles course materials. The Automated Vehicles University Course Module Series was developed as a resource for educators to include in their own lecture materials that focuses on AVs and pedestrian and bicycle topics. It will include terminology, history, technology, test strategies, pedestrian/bicyclist issues and emerging policy and rulemaking.

This resource is available on the Pedestrian and Bicyclist Information Center’s website: www.pedbikeinfo.org/resources/resources_details.cfm?id=5171

East Carolina University student pursuing occupational therapy degree is awarded HSRC scholarship

East Carolina University occupational therapy student, Juliette Leonardo, receives the 2019 Megan Cornog Memorial Highway Safety Scholarship. Leonardo will present to HSRC staff in spring 2020 to present on her research, “Using Eye Tracking Technology to Compare Hazard Detection on Road Versus Driving Simulator At Night Across Two Age Groups,” which seeks to examine whether there are differences between older and younger adults in scanning for on-road hazards, and if there are differences in driving performance in real-world driving versus driving on a simulator. Read more

HSRC researchers earn two TRB awards for one paper

Wesley Kumfer, engineering research associate and lead author, and Senior Research Associates Bo Lan, Laura Sandt and Libby Thomas earned two Transportation Research Board honors for one paper, the prestigious 2019 Patricia F. Waller Award and the 2019 Outstanding Paper Award from the Standing Committee on Pedestrians (ANF10) for their paper, Midblock Pedestrian Crash Predictions in a Systemic, Risk-Based Pedestrian Safety Process. Read more

October 2 is National Walk to School Day

Communities across the nation will be celebrating National Walk to School Day this October. While October 2 is this year’s official date, communities are welcome to celebrate any day in October. More than 5,600 communities across the U.S. registered for Walk to School Day in 2018. A new Vision Zero for Youth webinar series shares ideas for improving safety for all people walking and bicycling. Join the movement that inspires the entire community to come together and promote health and safer routes for students to walk and bike to school. Register online

Summer Transportation Institute activities led by HSRC & CSCRS researchers

High school students from the North Carolina A&T State University Summer High School Transportation Institute visited Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab in July. In addition to touring the lab with HAL Director and Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety Researcher Missy Cummings, they experienced other demonstrations by HSRC and CSCRS researchers. HSRC’s Bevan Kirley led students to explore the physics of car crashes by designing their own safe vehicles using dolls and skateboards, then crashing them into bricks. Students also designed their own miniature safe road by adding safety-related features like bike lanes, signs, streetlights and more with HSRC’s Wes Kumfer. Learn more