A new breed of road engineers

“Forgiving and caring highways” may sound fanciful, but Civil Engineering Prof. Tarek Sayed argues that building roads that anticipate and prevent accidents is a smart way to go.

Worldwide, car accidents claim 1.3 million lives each year. Annually, car accidents cost the Canadian economy five per cent of the GDP or $62 billion. Moreover, 95 per cent of car crashes are attributed to driver error.

“I’m not saying that we should ignore bad driving,” says Sayed, “but road safety countermeasures are a cost-effective solution that can save lives and money.”

He contends that solutions can be as simple as making traffic lights more visible or etching “rumble strips” along certain stretches of highway. These grooves in the pavement keep drivers alert and prevent them falling asleep at the wheel.

Sayed explains that current standards guiding highway design and planning stem from the 1950s when mobility and standardization rather than safety evaluation were priorities. But UBC is helping to nudge standards into a new direction, he says. Having supervised more than 50 graduate students, Sayed is producing a new breed of engineers keen to build “smart” roads.

“UBC is doing very well in this area,” says Sayed, who is plugged into an informal network of safety-minded engineers working around the world.

A 2009 study that Sayed completed for the Insurance Corporation of B.C. underlines the value of explicit safety analysis. With co-author Paul de Leur, an ICBC engineer, Sayed evaluated 102 road improvement projects that ranged from signage to median barriers and roundabouts to left-hand turn bays. These improvements led to a 20 per cent reduction in fatal and severe injury crashes and a 12 per cent reduction in non-injury crashes.

In anticipation of the 2010 Olympic Games, the B.C. Ministry of Transportation enlisted Sayed’s help in 2003 in choosing the safest designs for the redevelopment of the scenic Sea to Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler.

Sayed provided safety analysis and collision prediction data for the highway, notorious for its rocky, steep and mountainous topography. The Ministry was then able to clarify design parameters, such as the number of curves or the desired degree of a curve.

“Compared to the old Sea to Sky highway, the new design has been able to reduce accidents by 50 per cent.”

Related  UBC research

Civil Engineering Asst. Prof. Gordon Lovegrove is one of Tarek’s former students who has set up a sustainable road safety lab at UBC’s Okanagan campus.

www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ 2010/07/01/prof-launches-first-sustainable-road-safety-lab/