Macroscopic Review of Driver Gap Acceptance and Rejection Behavior at Rural Thru-Stop Intersections in the US - Data Collection Results in Eight States: CICAS-SSA Report #3

Crashes at rural thru-stop intersections arise primarily from a driver attempting to cross or enter the mainline traffic stream after failing to recognize an unsafe gap condition.

Because the primary cause of these crashes is not failure to stop, but failure to recognize an unsafe condition, the US DOT FHWA, MnDOT, and the University of Minnesota ITS Institute undertook the CICAS-SSA program. CICAS-SSA uses roadside radar sensors, a computer processor and algorithms to determine unsafe conditions, and an active LED icon based sign to provide timely alerts and warnings which are designed to reduce the frequency of crashes at rural expressway intersections.

These rural, thru-stop crashes are problems in many states. In conjunction with the CICAS-SSA program, MnDOT and the University of Minnesota led a nine-state (CA, GA, IA, MI, MN, NC, NH, NV, and WI) pooled-fund study whereby driver behavior data at rural thru-stop intersections was collected by the Minnesota Mobile Intersection Surveillance System (MMISS).

The ultimate goal of the pooled fund study and the analysis of that data described here, was to identify whether drivers in different regions of the county exhibit different gap acceptance/rejection behavior, and if different driver behaviors are identified, determine whether they are different enough to inhibit the deployment of a common CICAS-SSA design throughout the US. The analysis of the data indicated that the system can indeed be deployed nationally.