This Transportation Research Record contains 28 papers dealing with statistical methods in highway safety research; highway safety data, analysis, and evaluation; occupant protection; and systematic reviews and meta-analysis. The papers address such topics as risk and crash prediction models, crashes on freeways and at signalized intersections, multivehicle crash prediction, speed and safety, red light running crashes, freeway lane closures, ramp design, accident exposure, rumble strip benefits, collisions with median trees, intersection safety, accident reconstruction, safety effects of speed limit changes, geometric design and head-on crashes, deer-vehicle crashes, sport utility vehicle rollover, vehicle occupancy and crash risk, a logit model for studying injury severity, abdominal injuries in rail passengers, healthy transport policies, and meta-analysis.

The Congress has charged the Department of Transportation with the task of achieving a reduction in traffic accidents and their resulting deaths and injuries. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is the Departmental agency which formulates and administers safety programs designed to meet these goals. To evaluate existing and proposed highway safety and motor vehicle safety standards, identify problem areas, establish better safety systems and generate improved standards and remedial measures, a strong analytical foundation is required. The National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA) was established to develop a comprehensive, reliable and timely data collection program and provide the necessary foundation to support NHTSA's highway safety activities. The Center is responsible for all activities related to accident statistics from experimental design through data collection, storage, analysis and dissemination.

Covers empirical approaches to outlier detection in intelligent transportation systems data, modeling of traffic crash-flow relationships for intersections, profiling of high-frequency accident locations by use of association rules, analysis of rollovers and injuries with sport utility vehicles, and automated accident detection at intersections via digital audio signal processing.

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 295: Statistical Methods in Highway Safety Analysis focus on the type of safety analysis required to support traditional engineering functions, such as the identification of hazardous locations and the development and evaluation of countermeasures. Analyses related specifically to driver and vehicle safety are not covered, but some statistical methods used in these areas are of relevance and are summarized where appropriate.