Transoft Solutions’ Lana Samara was presented the 2023 Best Young Researcher Award at the 102nd Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, for the Transportation Safety Management Systems award category.
Ms. Samara, a Project Specialist on Transoft Solutions’ Traffic Safety team, co-authored a paper titled ‘Do Traffic Countermeasures Improve the Safety of Vulnerable Road Users at Signalized Intersections? A Combination of Case-control and Cross-sectional Studies Using Video-based Trajectory Data and Surrogate Measures of Safety’, led by Qiangqiang Shangguan from the University of Waterloo in Canada. Additional co-authors include Jessica Keung and Liping Fu also from the University of Waterloo, as well as Junhua Wang and Ting Fu of Tonji University in Shanghai, China.
With Vision Zero initiatives being adopted in many cities around the world, significant investments have been made in various safety programs aimed at eliminating road fatalities. However, there is a lack of reliable quantitative evidence on the effectiveness of those countermeasures and their relation to various external factors. The research aims to quantify the safety effects of three commonly applied Vision Zero countermeasures through a case study conducted using video trajectory data from ten signalized intersections in the City of Toronto. These findings hope to help road safety engineers and decision makers make better informed decisions on their road safety initiatives and projects.
Ms. Samara is the Product Specialist at Transoft Solution’s Transportation Safety Business Unit. She holds a B.Eng. and is currently pursuing her M.Eng. in Civil Engineering from McGill University.