My Job

Lots of my friends and family don't really understand what I do at my job. Since I'm thinking about this fact, I figure I'll try to lay it out here. Maybe I'll try a "FAQ" format...

Q: What's your position called?
A: I'm a full-time highway safety researcher.

Q: Do you work for the Department of Transportation (DOT)?
A: Nope. I work for the UNC Highway Safety Research Center. Officially it is a department of UNC Chapel Hill, so yea, I work for the "Dark Side" (I'm an NC State grad). In actuality, we're mostly like a stand-alone research center that operates from the UNC-CH campus.

Q: So, if you're not the DOT, what do you do?
A: Well, to put it simply, the DOT designs and builds roads. We provide the research that tells them how they can make those roads as safe as possible. So, indirectly, I DO work for the DOT, since they fund our research projects.

Q: What kind of research projects?
A: The best way is probably just to give examples of projects I'm working on. A big focus area for us lately is pedestrian and bicyclist safety. In one recent study, we took a bunch of intersections and correlated certain aspects (e.g, number of lanes, amount of traffic, etc) to pedestrian and bicycle safety. The resulting tool is intended for traffic engineers. If applied to all the intersections in a city, it will indicate which ones have the highest chance of being dangerous to pedestrians and bicyclists.
Another project examines the effect of several "countermeasures". When there is a safety problem at a certain road or intersection, traffic engineers will employ various treatments - countermeasures - to try to reduce the crashes that are occurring there. For example, they might take a intersection with stop signs and add a flashing light to make drivers more aware of the intersection. We are looking at four of these countermeasures and are seeing if they have had any effect on crashes in the locations where they were used.
In another project, we will be examining data on crashes that involved tractor-trailers. We'll compare the characteristics of trucks involved in crashes to characteristics of trucks NOT involved in crashes to see if anything stands out. For example, we might find that truckers who have driven more than "X" consecutive hours are more likely to be involved in a crash.

Q: Are you out on the highways much?
A: Unfortunately, no. As you could tell from my descriptions of those projects, most of my work involves handling and examining sets of data. I'm in front of the computer most of the time. But on the plus side, I'm becoming an Excel pro.

Q: When will we see some more Aria posts?
A: I'll do my best to make it soon.