Fall 2022: Today’s Roads, Tomorrow’s Technologies: Road Safety in a Changing World

Affiliations:	DeBakey Executive Research Leadership Program
Project Leader:	Tara Goddard, Ph.D. goddard@tamu.edu Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning
Faculty Mentor:
Meeting Times:	Tuesdays 2 pm and/or Wednesdays 11 am
Team Size:	3
Open Spots:	0
Special Opportunities:	Co-authorship on journal articles and white papers will be possible for all students who contribute to the work; public speaking opportunities and/or webinar presentation opportunities are likely
Team Needs:	Previous interest in traffic safety, planning, and/or automobile technologies is useful but not required. Basic data entry, spreadsheet manipulation, and internet research will form a significant part of the work. Experience with literature reviews and annotated bibliographies is a plus, but can be learned in the program
Description:	While the streets and roads of today look much like they did for the last century, our automobiles are nothing like those of a generation or two ago. Today’s vehicles are more computer than car, which has implications for the safety of people both in and outside of the vehicle. In the last few years there have been a proliferation of driver-assistance systems aimed at improving safety: technologies like forward collision warning, pedestrian detection, and blind-spot monitoring. Yet, there is still much that researchers do not know about how these technologies are marketed, sold, and demonstrated to drivers, nor have law enforcement monitoring or collection techniques necessarily kept up with the rapid deployment of these technologies. In this project, there will be multiple ways that undergraduate researchers will be able to contribute to this multi-phase research study and gain experience with research design, both quantitative and qualitative research methods, data analysis, and interdisciplinary group project work