If you've driven from Lubbock to just about anywhere else in the state, you know that there are some long highways in Texas - nearly 79,000 miles of interstates, U.S. highways, state highways, farm-to-market and ranch-to-market roads.
A more sobering statistic is that on the thousands of miles of roads in Texas, there are also thousands of fatal crashes each year. In 2013 alone, there were 3,377 fatalities and 232,041 crash-related injuries on Texas roads, amounting to a person killed every two hours and 36 minutes and a person injured every two minutes and 16 seconds, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.
These numbers are what prompted Texas Tech traffic researcher Wesley Kumfer to determine what was causing so many crashes on Texas roads. The common denominator? The drivers themselves.
"Humans are responsible for most crashes," Kumfer said. "We researchers tend to believe that 90 percent or more of crashes are caused by human error. If you can eliminate that human error, which is what autonomous vehicles will try to do, then ideally you’ll be able to cut down on crashes."
Autonomous vehicles - self-driving cars - and other highly developed driving technologies are marking a change in driving technologies, Kumfer said. But that technology that's causing change among drivers might also be able to reveal something about the drivers themselves.
"Transportation in the US is in a state of flux that’s driven by technology, more so than ever before," Kumfer said. "There’s technology altering the way that we do transportation. I mean, we have smart sensors that allow for better traffic signalization, for more coordinated movements, and the autonomous vehicles are examples of upcoming technology. The US Department of Transportation’s overarching goal is to have data-driven change, and so for the first time in decades we have what’s called ‘big data’ so we just have terabytes, or petabytes of data that we’re trying to understand and to decipher to help us understand how people drive and why."
Kumfer's research, which he is presenting in Washington D.C. this weekend as a part of the meeting of the federal Transportation Research Board, focuses on the driver demographics that are involved in fatal crashes.
"The [research] deals with looking at population factors," Kumfer said. "I fit them to a very basic statistical model to see if you can predict total crashes in a state or in the country just based on certain populations of people. So the population of men versus women, the population of each different race, different age groups, etc., to see if that has an impact on the total number of crashes."
Of the demographics that Kumfer's research studied, teenage drivers were discovered to be the most dangerous drivers on the road, which led Kumfer, his mentor Honchao Liu, and TxDOT to develop a driver's education program aimed at teens in Lubbock and area high schools.
Because a fatal crash - no matter the demographic - on a Texas road can cost the state millions of dollars, Liu and Kumfer said even minute differences in fatality and crash rates can make a significant impact, making the research crucial for transportation engineers and traffic engineers.
"Highway engineering, or traffic engineering, is focused on the highway part of these five elements [air, water, rail, road and pipeline]," Liu said. "We do planning, design, operation and control and optimization of highway facilities, just [to] put it in one word. So transportation is all about how to move people safely and in a timely manner from one place to another."
"Some US Department of Transportation statistics indicate that one fatal crash may cost the state about $4 million dollars," Kumfer said. "Two percent would be about four lives saved a year - and it’s not much - but to put it in monetary terms, it’s about $16-17 million dollars per year.
"But human life is even way more important than even that, so if we can even save just one life, I’m happy."
