Papers

HIT: A GIS-Based Hotspot Identification Taxonomy

  June 1, 2009      Analytics, Motor Vehicles, Traffic Safety
Steil, D. and A. Parrish; International Journal of Computers and Their Applications, to appear, 2009.

The authors have developed a Hotspot Identification Taxonomy (HIT) that organizes the various methods for viewing hotspots. Basically they are defined as follow:

• First order - high crash frequency road segments possibly filtered for specific event(s);
• Second order - road segments defined as those that have high event counts specifically related to a countermeasure under consideration (e.g., selective enforcement for the speed event);
• Third order - segments having a high frequency of countermeasure-related events and for which the countermeasure was historically effective.

Effective use of the HIT model required four interrelated activities: data-collection, linear hotspot identification, presentation and assessment.

Analysis of the Wet vs. Dry Counties within Alabama (pdf)

  January 31, 2009      Analytics, Health and Human Services, Law Enforcement
Brown, D., CAPS Research Report, Jan. 31, 2009.

CARE IMPACT analyses were performed to compare 13 dry counties with 13 wet counties over their various crash characteristics for a recent five-year (2003-2007) time period. The results fall into two logical categories: those that compare the demographics of the counties and those that compare the crash characteristics with regard to alcohol. A few of the nearly 200 attribute comparisons are presented in this report in order to guide the future direction of the research project.

A Review of Youth-Alcohol Traffic Crashes in Alabama During CY 2007 (pdf)

  January 15, 2009      Law Enforcement, Motor Vehicles, Traffic Safety
Brown, D., A. Watkins, CAPS Research Report, Jan. 15, 2009.

As part of their youth-alcohol program, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs requested a special study to focus on the development of Youth-DUI countermeasures. This report is in three sections. The first is a summary of recommended countermeasures in prioritized order based upon estimated cost-benefit. The recommendations are based upon the detailed analysis performed for Alabama and reviews of potential countermeasures given in the literature. The second and third sections of this report provide the detailed data analysis that was originally performed for the State of Alabama for CY (calendar year) 2003. These have been updated using CY 2007 data.

Alcohol Age Crash Analysis – Projections of the Effect of Lowering the Legal Drinking Age in Alabama (pdf)

  August 16, 2008      Analytics, Health and Human Services, Law Enforcement
Brown, D., CAPS Research Report, Aug. 16, 2008.

This report, and the Op Ed that follows it, is in response to a number of prominent college presidents who have recently come out in favor of lowering the drinking age to 18 years. The goal of the report is to project how many additional fatalities will be caused in Alabama should the law be change in Alabama.

A Host Architecture for Automobile License Plate Recognition

  May 1, 2008      Law Enforcement, Motor Vehicles
Mitchell, M, M. Hudnall, D. Brown, D. Cordes, R. Smith, A. Parrish, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics 2008 (ISI 2008), New Brunswick, NJ, May 2008.

The objective of this paper was to present an architecture that supports data transmission and data sharing among applications related to commodity tag recognition systems. These systems are used extensively in Great Britain and other countries to recognize automobile license plates and to notify security officials of suspicious activity or trafficking by known suspects. This architecture was tested in a successful pilot project.