An Exploration of Contemporary Issues in Highway Safety, Evolving Transportation Alternatives, and Activity and Travel Behavior Modeling

University Transportation Centers Program2020PDFTech ReportManess, MichaelMannering, FredPinjari, Abdul R.Zhang, YuAlnawmasi, NawafBarbour, NataliaIslam, MouyidBhat, ChandraShankar, VenkyAbdel-Aty, MohamedLuong, TrangMishra, DivyamitraUniversity of South Florida. School of Civil and Environmental EngineeringCenter for Teaching Old Models New Tricks (TOMNET)United States. Department of Transportation. University Transportation Centers (UTC) ProgramCenter for Teaching Old Models New Tricks (TOMNET)United StatesAggressionAutonomous vehiclesBicyclesCellular telephonesDemographicsDriversElectric vehiclesElectric vehicle chargingHighway safetyMode choiceRidesourcingSubsidiesTravel behaviorVehicle sharingEconometric ModelingRide-HailingBike SharingSocial CapitalRenting of Personal Vehicles69A35517471169/2019 \u2013 8/2020This report addresses a multitude of contemporary issues in highway safety, evolving transportation alternatives, and activity and travel behavior modelling. The report begins by studying issues relating to big data, traditional data and the tradeoffs between prediction and causality in highway-safety analysis, showing that a combination machine learning methods and advanced statistical methods are the most promising directions for future research. The report then moves on to study ridehailing-usage rate where a multitude of factors were found to influence usage including self-assessed health, high body mass index, and registration for other shared mobility services were all found to play roles in ridehailing usage. The report then studies the emerging phenomena of carsharing and specifically the renting of personal vehicles, identifying important factors that influence the success of such programs. The report then presents a study of aggressive driving and a study of the factors affecting work zone safety to highway work zone safety, showing the importance of capturing unobserved effects and considering the temporal stability of model-estimated parameters. The report then shifts to the study of electric vehicles and an assessment of the zero-price effect to estimate a monetary value of free charging. Next, bikesharing behavior during holidays with one of the findings being that federal holidays negatively affect member ridership and positively affect non-member ridership. Finally, social capital is explored in relation to leisure activity behavior. By addressing critical contemporary modeling issues, this report provides practical insights as well as serving as a basis for future research.137