This report presents work conducted as part of North Carolina’s evaluation of its Highway Patrol TACT III operation (Ticketing Aggressive Cars and Trucks). TACT is a federally-funded effort to develop a model program of enhanced enforcement, education/media, and program evaluation that can be implemented at the state level. The goal of TACT is to reduce the contribution of aggressive driving behaviors to commercial motor vehicle (CMV)-involved crashes. In the present study, camera7 based detection methods were used to detect the incidence of following-too-close (FTC) within the context of prevailing CMV and passenger vehicle volumes, speeds, and lane position both “before” and “during” TACT enforcement operations. The data suggest that TACT enforcement may have a differential effect upon car and truck following distances. An increase in CMV following distances was observed in the rightmost lane of the interstate facility. A slight decrease in CMV speeds was also observed during the enforcement period. No significant changes, however, in speeds or vehicle following times were observed for passenger vehicles. The results indicate that the developed methodology is sensitive to detecting changes in driver behavior, and may thus become a potential alternative evaluation strategy for the TACT program in the future. The use of roadside instrumentation further enables future applications for automated driver feedback, in that FTC and speed violations may be automatically detected and relayed to the driver in an infrastructure-to-vehicle context like that used by dynamic speed signs. It is even possible that automated methods developed under this research could be used for automated enforcement in future applications.

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