UCF Research team honored with award combating wrong-way driving

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — A team from the University of Central Florida received an award from a national transportation advisory board for study on combating wrong-way driving.

The research team analyzed and modeled wrong-way driving on Central Florida toll road exit ramps to identify factor that contributed to wrong-way driving.

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The team will be honored at the 2022 Mid-year Committee Meeting held in Vienna, Austria this summer and will receive the physical Best Young Professional Paper Award from the Transportation Research Board during the board’s annual meeting in January 2023 in Washington, D.C.

The study was recently published in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board.

“We are very glad to have received this award as it shows that our research is respected by the freeway operations community,” said team leader and UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science Professor Haitham Al-Deek.

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This is the sixth year that Al-Deek’s team has received an award from the Transportation Research Board Freeway Operations Committee for their work on wrong-way driving.

The lead author of the paper is Adrian Sandt, who has been a part of Al-Deek’s research team since his time as an undergraduate in 2012.

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“The first transportation-related course I took was Professor Al-Deek’s Highway engineering class,” Sandt said. “This class increased my interest in the transportation engineering field and also led to Professor Al-Deek recruiting me to join his research team.”

By showing likely factors in wrong-way driving, such as multiple exit ramp lanes, higher exit street traffic volumes, and the presence of a toll booth on the exit ramp, this study will help transportation agencies make changes that could mitigate wrong-way driving, reduce crashes and save lives, Sandt added.

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