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Purpose – Intersections are hazardous locations and to improve their safety we need to understand the factors contributing to crashes at these locations and provide evidence-based recommendations to reduce them. This chapter provides a summary of the findings on infrastructure-related factors contributing to crashes at urban and rural intersections and some discussions on the implications and potential countermeasures.

Approach – A review of the literature on intersection crashes was performed to identify the infrastructure-related crash-contributing factors. Some discussions on the implications and potential countermeasures are then provided.

Findings – The factors contributing to road crashes are diverse and complex. While the safety effects of a few factors (e.g., exposure and speed) are relatively consistent, many factors have different impacts on crash frequency and severity (e.g., types of intersection) and different impacts on urban and rural intersections (e.g., bus stops).

Research Implications – More studies are needed on developing a stronger theoretical or conceptual foundation on the effects of roadway designs and traffic controls on different dimensions of safety (e.g., exposure, frequency, severity, etc.), types of crashes (e.g., head-on, rear-end, etc.) or road users involved (e.g., drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, etc.).

Practical Implications – Transport engineers need to be aware that some treatments may have different effects on different crash types and road users involved. Even though the overall safety may be improved by the treatments designed, they need to consider and mitigate any unintended consequences to satisfy the Pareto improvement principle and the social equity criterion.

Purpose – This chapter provides details of research that attempts to relate traffic operational conditions on uninterrupted flow facilities (e.g., freeways and expressways) with real-time crash likelihood. Unlike incident detection, the purpose of this line of work is to proactively assess crash likelihood and potentially reduce the likelihood through proactive traffic management techniques, including variable speed limit and ramp metering among others.

Methodology – The chapter distinguishes between the traditional aggregate crash frequency-based approach to safety evaluation and the approach needed for real-time crash risk estimation. Key references from the literature are summarised in terms of the reported effect of different traffic characteristics that can be derived in near real-time, including average speed, temporal variation in speed, volume and lane-occupancy, on crash occurrence.

Findings – Traffic and weather parameters are among the real-time crash-contributing factors. Among the most significant traffic parameters is speed particularly in the form of coefficient of variation of speed.

Research implications – In the traffic safety field, traditional data sources are infrastructure-based traffic detection systems. In the future, if automatic traffic detection systems could provide reliable data at the vehicle level, new variables such as headway could be introduced. Transferability of real-time crash prediction models is also of interest. Also, the potential effects of different management strategies to reduce real-time crash risk could be evaluated in a simulation environment.

Practical implications – This line of research has been at the forefront of bringing data mining and other machine-learning techniques into the traffic management arena. We expect these analysis techniques to play a more important role in real-time traffic management, not just for safety evaluation but also for congestion pricing and alternate routing.

Purpose – Urban and suburban arterials carry a large share of urban traffic and contend with a relatively large proportion of transport network crashes. Road crashes and their consequent societal costs diminish the sustainability of transportation systems, highlighting the need to identify road safety problems and their corresponding solutions. This chapter briefly outlines problems and solutions associated with crash risk on urban and suburban arterials. In addition, this chapter studies and discusses several safety countermeasures – ranging from local treatments to integral frameworks – and their effectiveness on improving traffic safety of urban and suburban arterials.

Approach – Crash occurrence on urban and suburban arterials is affected by numerous contributing factors. This chapter pays attention primarily to the effects of traffic characteristics and road design features. In this regard, several pertinent variables which have been extensively examined in the literature are reviewed and their contributions to the safety of urban and suburban arterials are discussed.

Findings – A review of the literature identifies a number of variables as influential factors of crashes on urban and suburban arterials. Although the associations of some variables (e.g., traffic volume) are consistent with expectations, others (e.g., lane width and speed) show mixed and sometimes counterintuitive results. These findings signify that additional research is needed to reveal the correct functional form and magnitude of these relationships.

Practical implications – The results show that while the general direction and magnitude of effects of some engineering and management-related treatments are known, additional research is needed to consolidate the impact and effectiveness of integrated approaches.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to review the methodological and empirical underpinnings of transport network screening, or management, as it relates to improving road safety. As jurisdictions around the world are charged with transport network management in order to reduce externalities associated with road crashes, identifying potential blackspots or hotspots is an important if not critical function and responsibility of transport agencies.

Methodology – Key references from within the literature are summarised and discussed, along with a discussion of the evolution of thinking around hotspot identification and management. The theoretical developments that correspond with the evolution in thinking are provided, sprinkled with examples along the way.

Findings – Hotspot identification methodologies have evolved considerably over the past 30 or so years, correcting for methodological deficiencies along the way. Despite vast and significant advancements, identifying hotspots remains a reactive approach to managing road safety – relying on crashes to accrue in order to mitigate their occurrence. The most fruitful directions for future research will be in the establishment of reliable relationships between surrogate measures of road safety – such as ‘near misses’ – and actual crashes – so that safety can be proactively managed without the need for crashes to accrue.

Research implications – Research in hotspot identification will continue; however, it is likely to shift over time to both closer to ‘real-time’ crash risk detection and considering safety improvements using surrogate measures of road safety – described in Chapter 17.

Practical implications – There are two types of errors made in hotspot detection – identifying a ‘risky’ site as ‘safe’ and identifying a ‘safe’ site as ‘risky’. In the former case no investments will be made to improve safety, while in the latter case ineffective or inefficient safety improvements could be made. To minimise these errors, transport network safety managers should be applying the current state of the practice methods for hotspot detection. Moreover, transport network safety managers should be eager to transition to proactive methods of network safety management to avoid the need for crashes to occur. While in its infancy, the use of surrogate measures of safety holds significant promise for the future.

The purpose of this study is to develop a new information and communication technology (ICT)-based approach for optimising safety transportation according to the needs of the current industrialised building system (IBS) building construction schemes. The improper handling and information management of road transport workers appears to be a major problem in the safety of the IBS building construction industry. Transportation activity is particularly problematic for IBS building construction projects in which traffic incident and safety management level are not in good condition to match with construction specification.

A new ICT-based approach is suggested for optimising safety transportation in accordance with the needs of the current IBS building construction schemes. As a precursor to this work, the concept of road transport workers practices is reviewed and the main features of ICT tools and techniques currently being used on such projects are presented.

The sophisticated road transport workers system solutions is described as an essential component of this optimisation to promote long-term safety and quality improvements of IBS building construction projects.

Finally, the potential for a research framework for developing such a system in the future is presented.

Using a sample of 214 US metropolitan areas, we examine the connection between the Great Recession and bad jobs, taking into consideration the macro-level determinants of the troubled economy. Our measure of bad jobs is derived from Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson’s (2000) conceptualization as those that have low pay, lack health insurance, and lack pension plans. We find that the Great Recession increased the prevalence of bad jobs, consistently for men and selectively for women. Among the macro-level processes, the decline of the manufacturing base, union membership, and public sector employment are sources of increasing bad jobs, especially for men. Those macro-level processes which are growing in influence such as casualization, globalization and financialization show no signs of reversing the negative trends in bad jobs. Human capital variables in the labor market such as educational and age variability consistently suggest more adverse effects on bad jobs for men than women. Our findings contribute to the further understanding of the nature of precarious work in a troubled economy.

The present paper highlights the increasing importance of remote learning amidst the closure of educational institutions in India in the wake of COVID-19. This paper not only discusses critical issues and challenges that remote learning system in the higher education sector in India has been encountering amidst this pandemic but also sheds light on ways to deal with them.

The paper makes use of secondary sources of data along with descriptive and comparative approaches to examine the issues, challenges and way forward for a transition from face-to-face teaching to remote learning in the case of India.

The paper suggests that greater use of this alternative mode of learning can be made for checking “human capital deficit,” preventing loss of future earnings (because of loss of education) and also for preparing a future-ready digital workforce to surf the Industry 4.0 wave. Besides, this can help to achieve the goal of “Education for all” and Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4). Among others, concerted policies for bridging skill gaps, forging partnerships and following equity-oriented policies for ensuring learning outcomes seem to be the way forward for a resilient education system.

As per our knowledge, no such study on the use of remote learning covering the higher education sector in India amidst COVID-19 has been done so far.