Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering

Program: Industrial Education and Technology
Degree Sought: Masters
Major professor: Dr. Nir Keren
Office address: 209A Industrial Ed. II
Office phone: 294-9936
E-mail: lorenzoiastate.edu

Lorenzo is a master student research the impacts of highway bypasses on crashes and citizenry in Iowa communities.

Using crash data provided by the Iowa Department of Transportation Lorenzo is employing a full Bayesian approach to explain and predict crash frequencies on Iowa bypasses. An exploratory analysis phase is currently being performed in order to develop an appropriate distribution model, a prior distribution, and the estimation of the model parameters. Upon establishing the model, a full Bayesian approach will be applied using the prior distribution with the crash data to forecast the effects of the construction of the bypass.

The results of the analysis will provide insights on whether the construction of bypasses reduces the number of crashes at the treated sites and whether the overall accident frequencies are reduced or simply shifted from the highway through the community to the bypass.