Suliman Gargoum

University of British Columbia | UBC · School of Engineering

Autonomous vehicle technology has been advancing over the past decade with many challenges and obstacles. One obstacle to achieving fully autonomous driving is the feasibility of efficiently producing robust high definition (HD) maps of existing road infrastructure in a sustainable manner. HD maps are digital twins of road infrastructure that inclu...

Background Cell phone use while driving is a significant safety problem all around the world. It is considered one of the main factors contributing to road crashes among young drivers. Aim To address this problem, it is important to determine how young drivers perceive the risk of using a cell phone while driving and to understand whether the perc...

Assessing the reliability and resiliency of transportation infrastructure is critical to improving the safety and sustainability of roadways. Such information, particularly when available on a network level helps transportation agencies identify vulnerable locations on their road network and make more informed decisions when managing infrastructure...

Fatalities and serious injuries still represent a significant portion of run-off-the-road (ROR) collisions on highways in North America. In order to address this issue and design safer and more forgiving roadside areas, more empirical evidence is required to understand the association between roadside elements and safety. The inability to gather th...

The variation in point cloud density is driven by many different factors. This variation is expected to affect the quality of the information extracted from the point clouds, however, the extent to which these variations impact the ability to accurately extract and assess geometric features of highways from point cloud data are unknown. This paper...

The amount of sight distance available to drivers is an extremely critical design element with significant impacts on the safe operation of highways. If the available sight distance on a roadway is limited, this reduces the ability of drivers to safely carry out certain maneuvers such as stopping or passing. Obstructions to sight distance are often...

Reliability analysis has been advocated as a robust methodology to quantify the risk (known as the probability of non-compliance, Pnc) associated with design limitations such as insufficient sight distance on horizontal curves. This risk represents the probability that the current design (e.g., available sight distance) would fail to meet the requi...

The past few months have seen a rapid global spread of the highly contagious novel coronavirus COVID-19. To halt the spread of the disease, decision makers and governments across the world have been forced to limit mobility and human interaction, which, has led to a complete lockdown on nonessential businesses and public places in many cities and c...

Maintaining an up-to-date repository of horizontal curve attributes is extremely important due to the role curves play in the safe operation of highways. Such attributes are typically collected using traditional surveying techniques which have been shown to be time-consuming, traffic disruptive, and potentially unsafe methods. This burden is furthe...

Stopping Sight Distance (SSD) is the distance defined in most highway design guides as the distance required by drivers to safely come to a complete stop in case of an emergency. Accordingly, design guides define theoretical values for SSD and recommend that these requirements are satisfied at all points along a highway corridor. SSD is estimated a...

The fundamental period of vibration is a critical structural dynamic characteristic in seismic design. Several expressions for the calculation of the fundamental period have been recommended by different building codes and previous studies. However, further studies are still needed to evaluate the design expressions used for the calculation of the...

Interest in using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology in Transportation Engineering has grown over the past decade. The high accuracy of LiDAR datasets and the efficiency by which they can be collected has led many transportation agencies to consider mobile LiDAR as an alternative to conventional tools when surveying roadway infrastructu...

Datasets collected using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology often consist of dense point clouds. However, the density of the point cloud could vary depending on several different factors including the capabilities of the data collection equipment, the conditions in which data are collected, and other features such as range and angle of...

Assessing vertical clearance at bridges is a preliminary step in most routine bridge inspections. This information is critical when assessing the structural integrity of bridges. Furthermore, clearance information at bridges and other overhead assets on a highway network is also extremely important when routing oversized vehicles on a highway netwo...

The number of light poles and their position (in terms of density and offset off the roadside) have significant impacts on the safe operation of highways. In current practice, inventory of such information is performed in periodic site visits, which are tedious and time consuming. This makes inventory and health monitoring of poles at a network lev...

Geometric design guides provide minimum standards that must be met to ensure the safe and efficient operation of highways. One of the most important elements when designing a highway is the sight distance available to road users. Designing safe highways involves ensuring that this distance exceeds the minimum distance required by drivers negotiatin...

Commercial vehicles on highway networks are only permitted to use routes that are designed to accommodate their sizes and weights. When issuing an over-height permit, agencies consider vertical clearances on all route options on a highway network before directing a vehicle to the optimal route. Inefficient routing of commercial vehicles could cause...

Horizontal curves are designed to provide a safe and smooth transition between straight segments on a highway network. Although curves are often designed to meet very stringent standards, imperfections during construction and high operating speeds mean that they are still prone to collisions. Therefore, it is essential that attributes of curves are...

Producing as-built drawings is an important task in any road construction project. In fact, in an ideal situation, these drawings must be updated whenever major maintenance work takes place. Unfortunately, constantly updating those drawings is not always feasible due to the amount of manual work associated with the data collection in traditional su...

An important element of highway design is ensuring that the available sight distance (ASD) on a highway meets driver needs. For instance, if the ASD at any point on a highway is less than the distance required to come to a complete stop after seeing a hazard (i.e. Stopping Sight Distance (SSD)), the driver will not be able to stop in time to avoid...

Commercial driver licensing programs ensure that drivers have the appropriate skills to perform their duties in a safe and efficient manner. Establishing such standards with good compliance requires understanding industry professionals’ opinions on aspects of current training. In this paper achieving that objective is attempted through analyzing op...

Excessive speeding is a major traffic safety concern consequently, numerous countermeasures have been considered to mitigate this problem. Excessive speeding, street racing and stunt driving activities subject all road users to extreme risk. To address this problem, three Canadian provinces introduced severe sanctions against drivers who exceed spe...

Traffic signs are integral elements of any transportation network; however, keeping records of those signs and their condition is a tedious, time-consuming, and labor-intensive process. As a result, many agencies worldwide have been working toward automating the process. One form of automation uses remote sensing techniques to extract traffic sign...

Information about operating speeds is essential to design better roads, model traffic emissions, and ensure design consistency while efficient and safe operations on roads are maintained. Therefore, understanding how different factors affect operating speeds and developing operating speed prediction models are critical research issues. Many studies...

The safety of locations operating under high-speed conditions could significantly differ from that of locations operating under low-speed conditions. Therefore, different approaches must be adopted when speed and safety are analyzed and managed at locations operating under different regimes. However, it is necessary first to understand the factors...

Road safety is influenced by many factors; these factors include characteristics of the road, climate, traffic and, most importantly, vehicle speeds. Previous research shows that increases in speed are typically associated with an increased collision risk. Moreover, previous studies have also found relationships between road and traffic characteris...

Road geometry, vehicle characteristics, and weather conditions are all factors that impact a driver's perception of a safe or credible speed and, consequently, the driver's decision on whether or not to comply with the posted speed limit. In fact, the role a road's environment plays in a driver's perception of a credible speed limit is a topic that...

Mobile photo enforcement (MPE) programs are commonly implemented to regulate speed and improve road safety. However, most previous research focuses mainly on validating the safety effects of MPE, with very minimal discussion on the enforcement performance indicators (EPIs). Therefore, the goal of this study is to provide a better understanding of t...