Traffic safety can be greatly impacted by non-truck drivers' and freight truck drivers' behavior toward one another. Though truck drivers and car drivers are affected by everyday occurrences, such as time of day and weather, there are also factors which affect each group separately. Freight truck drivers, as Professor Srinivas Peeta of Transportation Engineering, graduate student Pengcheng Zhang of Civil Engineering, and former graduate student Weimin Zhou have found, are more affected by blind spots and restrictions of road geometry than car drivers. Non-truck drivers are generally more affected by the discomfort they feel in the vicinity of trucks, which has not been widely studied. The aim of this study is to understand the interaction of trucks and cars along with the affect they have on road safety.

Weimin Zhou, MSCE 2003, received the 2003 Pikarsky Best Thesis Award, from the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC), resulting from his thesis work for this research project.