Here In My Car, I Feel Safest Of All

Drivers and researchers in cities all over the US will be participating in a national, two-year study of American driving habits.

The Second Strategic Highway Research Program was created by Congress to investigate the underlying causes of highway crashes and congestion on the country’s roads. When completed, the two-year, $180 million Naturalistic Driving Study will have collected the equivalent of 2,000 driving years of data from thousands of participants in Centre County, Buffalo, N.Y., Bloomington, Ind., Durham, N.C., Tampa, Fla., and Seattle.

“The study will ensure decisions on matters of transportation are made based on mathematical models rather than educated guesses, like it has in past years,” said Penn State civil engineering professor Paul Jovanis, the principal researcher for the local portion of the project.

A study like this is long overdue, frankly.  Designing cities, roads, highways and transportation options of the future is a massive undertaking, and it's about time we had solid data on this to help with those designs.  Lost time, wasted fuel, and added emissions were bad enough in 2007, now these numbers are all worse.  But the modeling in this study goes further than that:  it shows how we drive as well.

The data, containing the unsparing details of every aggressive merge, inattentive swerve and jarring fender- bender, is uploaded every one-tenth of a second via a wireless router installed in the car, and is backed up on a hard drive kept inside the car. Combined with the results of a three-hour physiological and psychological exam taken by the driver, the data will be used to study transportation from academic perspectives ranging from psychology to economics.

“It’s the most comprehensive transportation study ever done,” Jovanis said.

Jovanis made assurances the data being collected is “extremely secure,” as it’s encrypted before it’s transmitted. Since each driver in the study is identified by a code, and not by name, the data would be difficult to use in a lawsuit against a participant resulting from an accident, Jovanis said.

In return, drivers receive $500 per year for one or two years, and are entered into a $1,000 raffle held every six months. But most participants have volunteered for the sake of science, said Janet Fraser, who coordinates the project’s assessments.

“They’ve been incredibly patient and understanding. Not one has turned down taking any portion of our testing, even though it’s all optional,” she said. 

Considering your average American spends something like 10 hours in a vehicle every week, you'd think we'd want to study this more just for the economic and environmental impact alone.  It's good to see it being done at the very least.