Zuhair Ebrahim

Examining Attitudes Towards Safe Speed to Protect Pedestrians

Share of night time pedestrian fatalities has been associated with human factors for many years. The focus of the present paper aims to examine the option of introducing 40km/h night zone speed limit. Particularly targeting the 60km/h limit roads to further protect pedestrians. Questionnaires of the study were distributed to a random sample of four groups. Australians (born in Australia) and three others, Australians born in different countries and belongs to Africa, Asia and Europe. The Questionnaires were related to preference of introducing 40km/h during the night (Night Zone) and also related to the delay concerns of introducing 40km/h during the day (Day Zone). The total number of participants in the study is 300 of the four groups. Each group has 75 participants. The study utilized age, gender and marital status as independent variables. Literature search has found different pedestrian fatality trends of the four cultural groups some are ascending and the others are descending. Therefore the study hypotheses that cultural groups living in Perth are different in terms of their attitudes towards the preference Night Zone and the delay concerns of the Day Zone. Acceptance of the Night Zone preference reached 64 % whereas; the mean rate responses reached 74 % for the Day Zone delay concerns. It was learned from results that attitudes differences existed between the cultural groups on both Night Zone and Day Zone options as hypothesised. Result showed that Asian group recorded the lowest rate for the Night Zone preference and cluster analysis depicted that clearly. There was statistically significant difference on drivers obeying the sign limit, between Asian and two groups namely African and Australian. Similarly cluster analysis performed for the Day Zone, indicated that European group was away from the rest of the clustered groups showing less concerns of implementing the Day Zone option on particular issue and that is, “European group do not believe that the delay is caused by the 40km/h speed limit but rather they believe it is due to the traffic signals”. Australian group were the most concern about implementing the Day Zone

Before and after studies to reduce the gap between road users and authorities

The paramount importance of safety for busy urban roads always comes from the responsibility towards protecting the vulnerable road users, who seem to be the victims in most road crashes. Thus, authorities tend to focus on reducing the travelling speed of the vehicles, whereas some road users may consider the move to interfere with mobility. In this paper, a case study of two roads in Perth was conducted to compare two engineering treatments of speed reductions on these two busy shopping strips. The study aim is to illustrate the effect of using the electronic flashing signs rather than the standard signs in terms of speeding reduction and harm minimisation. Crash data were analysed and supported the safety benefits of the electronic flashing signs. In terms of speeding, a Chi- Square analysis showed that there is an association between the engineering treatment type and the three detected speeding levels. Authorities have measured the reduction of the travelling speeds of vehicles and found it to be encouraging. The study found that despite the reduced crashes after the treatments the public seem to show different attitudes to the above safety issue. The study has shown that certain engineering measures can reduce the travelling speed of the vehicles without disturbing mobility. Road users are concerned with delay and other behavioural issue, the results of the questionnaires reveal. There are clear, positive safety benefits from the case study.

Harm Minimisation In A School Zone: A Strategy For Sustaining Pedestrian Safety

In an endeavour to achieve high standards, Australia has directed its attention to the Towards Zero strategy that involves aiming for no fatalities on the road. Road crashes are costing Australia

A Concern About Younger Drivers In Perth

18 billion every year. This paper highlights the sustainability benefits of the 40km/h school zone that has provided safer roads, higher savings and socially pleasant environments. It examines why school zone drivers are prompted to slow down and elsewhere they are not. They are the same drivers, but on different segments of the road network. This safe driving behaviour needs to be shifted to roads outside the school zones. A comparative analysis of the recent enforcement data has focused on two detection types, the ‘On the spot’ and ‘roadside’. Results show that two domains need to be continuously proactive: the no fatality approach and the harm minimisation approach (minor injuries rather than severe). The paper focuses on changing the detection type according to the environment of the zone. This is considered as the ultimate unfailing planning enforcement support. From an engineering viewpoint, the remarkable flashing 40km/h limit signs may have proven to be of impressive benefits in terms of drivers obeying the speed limit. The signs are bright and clear and most of all alerting as they flash, causing fast drivers to observe them and adjust their speed. It is concluded that the aim of achieving sustainability is to manage and monitor the maximum benefits of the trade-off between the diminishing returns in achieving highest harm minimisation and a police presence between school and non-school zones.

Camera System Deployment for Speeding Control in Australia

This paper highlights the concerns about younger drivers in Perth. Evidence suggests that this group of drivers were speeding at different levels particularly the highly excessive. Despite 60 km/h being considered a higher speed limit than the other two limits under this study, it was found that younger drivers are speeding and taking higher risks on roads that belong to the 40 and 50 km/h speed limits. The ‘On the spot’ detection found roads, which belong to 50 km/h, were also of concern. Male drivers were dominating the speeding on roads for the three speed limits roads studied. Pedestrian crash data also supported this evidence in concluding that the leading number of drivers who hit pedestrians belongs to this younger age group. Speeding and pedestrian crashes on 40 km/h on non-school zone roads are also examined and discussed. It is recommended that along with enforcement, two levels policy need to be targeted in parallel. First, a safety audit to the 50 and 60 km/h limits as a comprehensive municipal programme that may lower the limits to a safer speed on these roads needs to be adopted. Second, authorities may focus on younger drivers’ licence regulations in terms of speeding violations and accidents history and real scenario training that relates to that age group. Such policy direction may bring high returns in sustaining safer roads.

Examining safety of electronic signs: using ordinal logistic regression on speeding

ABSTRACT In Australia, the Auditor-General plays the role of checking on system fiscal efficiency, performance and effective communications between safety professionals and the public road users. The focus of this paper is to evaluate the possibility of public approval of the information that is to be released, e.g. camera strategic initiatives assessed by through mail-out questionnaires. Two visual-and- policy related attributes were investigated in these questionnaires. Each attribute had 5 initiatives. A multi-logistic regression is performed on the approval level of the drivers for the strategic initiative of running a speed-awareness course. This initiative is determined to be statistically significant using independent variables age, years of experience, status, gender, and the driver environment. Our analysis shows that the driver environment/background is found to be a significant independent variable for approving speed awareness courses. The road users from non-industrial areas are more likely to approve the idea of speed awareness courses than road users from industrial areas. They also welcome tougher demerit rules and the police enforcement. Our study suggests the speed awareness course, an educational initiative, should incorporate the tougher demerit rules to change the repetitive offenders driving behaviour. It is foreseeable that once these drivers are enrolled into the course, safer driving practices would be achieved for mitigating dangers, risk and trauma as the result of speeding. Our study may benefit professionals involved with improving traffic safety such as those in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Arab gulf countries particularly the kingdom of Saudi Arabia where a high number of fatalities and serious injuries involved speeding. Our study confirms that positive, transparent and satisfying initiative should be executed with care to maintain sustainable and safer roads for enhancing national partnership between road users and authorities.

Management of speeding comparing two applied engineering measures

Regional computer interlocking system (RCIS) is a signal control system, which performs all of the interlocking logic operations and implements the centralized control on multiple stations using one set of interlocking equipment alone. There are two diverse RCIS solutions in China, namely, the centralized interlocking scheme and the distributed interlocking scheme. The main deficiency of the former lies in that the entire system would be paralyzed once the central interlocking equipment fails. The latter overcomes the flaw of the former and can disperse the danger. However, it is not suitable for some small stations due to higher upfront investment. Hence, a better selection is that the two schemes are combined together to play their respective advantages and overcome each others shortcomings. As a safety-critical system, the RCIS is broadly applied but the investigations on it are rarely reported in reliability and safety. Based on it, this paper establishes the Markov model of the RCIS and investigates its reliability and safety. During modeling some significant factors, such as common-cause failure, coverage rate of diagnostic systems, online maintainability, and periodic inspection maintenance, and as well as diverse failure modes, are fully considered. The relevant researches show that the combination of the two RCIS schemes possesses better safety and reliability, and is an ideal realization mode, not only for the stations but also for the open lines between the stations. Keywords Interlocking scheme, Markov model, railway signal, regional computer interlocking system (RCIS), reliability, safety. Language: en