Intersection Decision Support: An Overview

Minnesota joined with California, Virginia, and the FHWA in a pooled fund consortium (the Infrastructure Consortium) dedicated to improving intersection safety. The Minnesota team's objective is to develop effective strategies to mitigate high crash rates at rural intersections. Rural Intersection Decision Support (IDS) focuses on enhancing the driver's ability to successfully negotiate rural intersections. The system uses sensing and communication technology to identify safe gaps in traffic on a high-speed rural expressway and communicate this information to drivers waiting to enter the intersection from a minor intersecting road. The goal of this system is to improve safety without introducing traffic signals, which on high-speed rural roads often lead to an increase in rear-end crashes. The Rural IDS research program achieved four main research results: an analysis of rural expressway intersections, including development of a technique to identify those with higher-than-expected crash rates; development of a statistical model that can be used to estimate the benefits of deploying IDS at a specific rural intersection; design and implementation of a rural intersection surveillance and data acquisition system capable of quantifying the behavior of drivers; and a task analysis, design study, and simulator-based evaluation of Driver Infrastructure Interface (DII) concepts for communicating relevant information to stopped drivers. This report summarizes the results of the rural IDS system.