Daniel Carter is a senior research associate at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC). He joined HSRC in 2004 and uses his civil engineering background to address highway safety from the standpoint of infrastructure improvements. His research experience includes the areas of roadway and safety data, countermeasure evaluation and pedestrian safety.
Daniel has been involved in numerous projects to evaluate safety improvements and produce crash modification factors (CMFs). He has been integrally involved with a series of Federal Highway Administration (FWHA) projects, Evaluation of Low Cost Safety Strategies, which focus on evaluating the crash saving benefits of low cost safety strategies such as signing, striping, rumble strips and flashing beacons. To disseminate these CMFs to the safety community, he manages the FHWA Crash Modification Factors Clearinghouse. Through this Clearinghouse, he works to identify and review CMFs in emerging studies and to provide guidance to users on how CMFs should be used. He led NCHRP Project 17-63, “Guidance for the Development and Application of Crash Modification Factors,” which addressed questions regarding the transferability of CMFs and applying CMFs for multiple treatments. He also serves as a member of the TRB Committee on Highway Safety Performance and participates in the CMF Subcommittee.
Daniel has gained much experience working with safety data, particularly spatial data. He frequently obtains roadway and crash data from state and local agencies and works to prepare data from these multiple sources to use in safety analysis. He works on the Highway Safety Information System to bring in GIS-based roadway and safety data and make it available to researchers. Daniel has been part of the team at HSRC to conduct a study using the Strategic Highway Research Program naturalistic and roadway data. He analyzed the spatial roadway data to determine the location of vertical and horizontal curves and obtained naturalistic driving data to be used in analyzing driver behavior and performance at these curve locations.
Daniel has also had experience with pedestrian safety. He served as principal investigator for NCRHP 3-62, Guidelines for Accessible Pedestrian Signals. Under this project, he conducted field trials with visually impaired pedestrians and subsequently taught training courses on accessible pedestrian signals. He contributed to NCHRP Project 17-56, Development of Crash Modification Factors for Uncontrolled Pedestrian Crossing Treatments, to evaluate the effect of several pedestrian safety treatments, including rectangular rapid flashing beacons and raised islands. He has also conducted evaluations of other signal-related pedestrian treatments, such as countdown pedestrian signals and leading pedestrian interval.
Daniel earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at North Carolina State University and is registered as a professional engineer in North Carolina.