A State of Practice of Safety and Big Data in Transportation Engineering Curricula and in Transportation Design : How is it Used and How can Academic Offerings Better Represent Industry Practices?

Graduation date: 2017Improving safety education could contribute to the preparation of better professional engineers. Safety topics are not holistically embedded in transportation course curricula. This thesis explores the current state in which safety is being incorporated in transportation course curricula in terms of design and compares the uses of safety data in three different professional transportation settings (practice, research, education). Moreover, the use of safety data is investigated to find the way in which it is defined by professionals from different settings. The methodology used in this study involves a semi-structured interview, survey and a syllabi analysis as a medium to collect the data to answer the research questions. It was found from the results of this thesis, that safety is being underrepresented in course curricula and that various applications involving the use of traffic volume data and roadway inventory data are not being sufficiently addressed in course curricula as they are being utilized in transportation practice. Moreover, the definition of the term “big data” in transportation is similarly defined by transportation engineers from the three settings, mainly defined as a large collection of data points for the purpose of data analysis. The most common difference can be encountered in the way that these professionals explain the term with its various applications relative to the transportation setting