The Texas Transportation Institute's Center for Transportation Safety is home to a fully interactive driving simulator, which allows participants to navigate a real vehicle through a realistic computer- generated driving environment. The center works closely with safety- related work being pursued by other agencies. The largest project to use the simulator, which has been in operation since 1999, tested 200 participants to examine drivers' preferences for left-turn signal displays. Two additional projects measured drivers' distractions due to cell phone use and other in-vehicle devices such as navigation systems. Another recent project is an on-line, two-way integration of the driving simulator with the traffic microsimulation program, VISSIM. Another is investigating how pedestrians interact with the roadway environment.
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