Gord Lovegrove, University of British Columbia
Associate Professor
Engineering
Okanagan
Vancouver, British Columbia
gord.lovegrove@ubc.ca
Office:
(250) 807-8717
Expert In
Bio/Research
The burden on communities due to the enormous economic and social costs associated with road collisions has been recognized worldwide as a major problem and impacts directly on the sustainability of our society. There exists a research gap of reliable empirical tools to pursue road safety in a p...
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Bio/Research
The burden on communities due to the enormous economic and social costs associated with road collisions has been recognized worldwide as a major problem and impacts directly on the sustainability of our society. There exists a research gap of reliable empirical tools to pursue road safety in a proactive and sustainable manner. Therefore development of macro-level Collision Prediction Models (CPMs), and guidelines for their use by planners and engineers is a critical need for our community. Macro-level CPMs will allow road safety to be explicitly considered and reliably estimated in all stages of the road planning process. These models predict mean collision frequency based on associations with variables from one of four neighborhood characteristic themes, including exposure, socio-demographics (S-D), Transportation Demand Management (TDM), and network. Dr. Lovegrove and his team have developed models for Victoria, Vancouver, Kelowna, and Ottawa, in Canada. He is seeking partnerships to develop and apply his models in other cities across Canada, with the intent to plan, design, and build neighborhoods based on his SRS principles to validate his theoretical modeling results. Development and use of these innovative models can facilitate enhanced sustainability through improved safety planning decisions, with significant long term social and economic benefits for all community members. Dr Lovegrove is also seeking commercial partners as early adopters of his modeling technology, including his ongoing work to develop an expert system in his SRS Research Lab that will accelerate and automatic the development and application of his models by practitioners world wide. His research has resulted in a novel neighborhood road pattern design – the 3-way Offset - that suggests that over 60% of common road collisions in neighborhoods can be eliminated. He also wishes to use his models to show the progressive improvement in road safety as more and more drivers get out of cars and onto bicycles, buses, and sidewalks.
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