School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

Exposure & Attitudes:Transportation Safe Systems via Bayesian Monitoring & Attitudinal Research  

By Rachael Thompson Panik

Advisors:  Michael Rodgers, PhD (CEE) | Kari Watkins, PE, PhD (University of California - Davis)

Committee Members:  Iris Tien, PhD (CEE) | Patricia Mokhtarian PhD (CEE) |
Aditya Prakash, PhD (CSE) | Jonathan Rupp, PhD (Emory University)

Date and Time:  May 3, 2024, 11:00AM

Location: Kendeda 210

Traffic safety is a crisis in the United States, especially for people biking and walking. While traffic safety is a complex problem with many parts, a common challenge arises around decision-making to improve safety outcomes. It is often not clear to decision-makers where or how to direct safety improvements. This dissertation investigates two major challenges that can hinder decision-making around traffic safety in the U.S.: (1) the lack of exposure information about bicyclists and pedestrians which precludes calculation of risk-based prioritization of safety projects; and (2) how attitudes of engineers entering the workforce may contribute to negative safety cultures in decision-making organizations, including transportation agencies, government, and technology companies.
 
First, this dissertation uses a novel application of Bayesian statistics to estimate volumes of people biking and walking on roadways in Georgia. One of the more prominent challenges facing transportation agencies is that the limited information about when and where people walk and bike in the transportation systems, which precludes them from prioritizing safety countermeasures that reduce system-wide risk. Using commonly-available data, this dissertation defines the methodology and model specification for creating high-resolution estimates of biking and walking as a proxy of risk exposure, moving the field towards an towards an epidemiological approach to safety interventions.
 
Second, even if decision-makers have good data informing their decisions, they still must have adequate knowledge about safe systems and the nature of crashes in order to make effective safety interventions. To begin investigations of future engineering organization's safety culture, this dissertation measures attitudes towards safety, starting at the earliest stages of safety culture formation: engineering students. This research presents findings from an exploratory study that surveyed engineering students at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Findings from this work lay the groundwork for future research to explore how emerging engineers' understanding of and attitudes towards safety may influence organizational safety culture and poor safety outcomes.