The Connecticut Department of Transportation has received a grant from the FMSCA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) to provide state and local law enforcement with training on how to investigate commercial and heavy vehicle crashes. The project will be administered by Eric Jackson, PhD, director of the Connecticut Transportation Safety Research Center and an associate research professor of civil and environmental engineering in UConn’s School of Engineering.
Since January 1, 2015, there have been over 12,000 crashes involving large trucks and buses in Connecticut and approximately 8,000 on U.S. Routes and local roads, over 2,000 of which resulted in fatalities or injuries.
The only category that lags behind in Connecticut’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration rating is its large vehicle crash investigation data and procedures. It has been quite some time since Connecticut has offered commercial and heavy vehicle crash training courses, leaving a significant gap in law enforcement personnel’s ability to effectively investigate these crashes and determine their causes.
With Jackson’s guidance, this project will improve law enforcement personnel’s ability to investigate fatal and serious crashes involving commercial and other heavy vehicles and provide them with a better understanding of the factors that cause these tragic crashes.
The project will focus on training officers to identify the unique factors that cause these crashes, such as specific driver behaviors and roadway factors that may be overlooked and reported inaccurately now due to the lack of widespread adequate training.
By becoming better at identifying the factors that cause large motor vehicle crashes, data gathered from the reports generated by these newly trained personnel have the capacity to help prevent future crashes.
Jackson received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from UConn in 2008. His research focuses on transportation data systems, web-based data collection, distribution, and analysis, safety data integration and analysis and remote sensing and geographic information systems. Jackson has worked to improve motor vehicle crash data collection and safety analysis in Connecticut and has made this information more easily available to the public. He is also working on developing software that will allow the state to fully implement Highway Safety Manual methods.
