pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Recently, PacTrans Associate Director and OSU Professor of Civil and Construction Engineering, David Hurwitz, took part in a Minnesota Public Radio news segment titled, How can we make Minnesota’s roads safer? Professor Hurwitz was joined by Brian Sorenson, the state traffic engineer for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and Colonel Matt Langer, the chief of the Minnesota State Patrol, to discuss the recent rise in traffic crashes.

When asked what he thinks has caused the increase in traffic fatalities, Professor Hurwitz said, “This phenomenon is not unique to Minnesota, it’s happening across the country. We think there are a variety of contributing causes. One potential factor is that we saw traffic volumes decrease during the early stages of the pandemic and roadways of a variety of different classifications had less traffic operating on them, therefore the opportunities to speed increased in places where congestion would typically slow speeds…we have enough data to know there’s an increasing trend in fatality and serious injury outcomes from crashes across the country, but the explanatory mechanism…the why…is alluding us.”

Professor David Hurwitz conducts research in the areas of transportation human factors, transportation safety, traffic control devices, and engineering education. In particular, Hurwitz is interested in the consideration of user behavior in the design, evaluation, and innovation of surface transportation systems. Additionally, his program contributes to advancing the state of the practice in transportation engineering education through the development of research-based curricula, assessment tools, and learning theories. Hurwitz leverages the Oregon State University Driving and Bicycling Simulator Laboratory and a significant array of traffic data collection tools to provide a more detailed understanding of how and why transportation systems perform the way they do.