Preventing Motor Vehicle Crashes among Young Drivers: Research on Driving Risk Amoung Novice Teen Drivers"

THIS IS A NOTICE OF INTENT, NOT A REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL. A SOLICITATION DOCUMENT WILL NOT BE ISSUED AND PROPOSALS WILL NOT BE REQUESTED. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Branch, Office of Acquisitions intends to negotiate a 3 year extension to the contract with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) to continue research on preventing motor vehicle crashes among young drivers. The planned extension will enable VTTI to continue this research without delay, advance the work, extend data analyses, and enhance the value of the study to the government and science. The requirements of the contract are: - Develop additional measures of driving performance, including error scores for intersection, merge, and straight road segments; - conduct additional coding and - reduction of data for analyses of crashes and near crashes, driving performance, and eye glance; - compare driving performance and risk between teens and parents; - conduct additional analyses of the data collected on driving performance by driving conditions; - compare the driving data collected and similar data collected by VTTI with other funding, including under separate contracts from the Department of Transportation (DOT), Virginia DOT, and other sources; - compare driving performance among youth from different school districts with varied supervised practice driving experience Substantial amounts of data have been collected but cannot be coded and analyzed within the original budget. VTTI will conduct data coding, reduction, and analyses of these data and related sets. These additional analyses will provide new information about how driving performance among young drivers varies over time and under various driving conditions. The proposed work would provide new information about important research questions that have implications for behavioral, technical, and policy interventions to reduce crashes among young drivers. Statutory authority: 41 U.S.C. 253(c)(1), as set forth in FAR 6.302-1(a)(2)(ii), only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements. The contractor is uniquely qualified by virtue of its continued performance over this period of time and is the only source that can provide the data for the following reasons: Under the existing contract VTTI has recruited the 40 teenage drivers and will complete data collection during the summer of 2008. Recruiting is underway for the 100 teenagers and their parents whose vehicles will be instrumented from the time of permit to license plus 6 months. VTTI developed the technology that is being used for these studies and only VTTI has the capacity for standardized and validated data coding and reduction procedures for assessing driving performance, risk, and crash/near crash events. The unique qualifications of the contractor include the following: 1) This research involves the collection of massive amounts of data too large to transfer. The data is stored electronically in a structure built for this purpose at the VTTI with elaborate data security provisions. 2) VTTI is the proprietary owner of the vehicle instrumentation used to collect the data and is uniquely qualified to code, reduce, and analyze the data. 3) VTTI has developed unique, standard coding and data reduction procedures for the naturalistic data collected, including video footage and accelerometer data 4) VTTI has developed standard training procedures for data reduction in these processes. 5) The data are highly confidential, given the use of cameras in the vehicle and could not ethically be made available to other researchers before the data were reduced and subject confidentiality could be assured. The data reduction laboratory provides unique data confidentiality procedures. No other contractor has a naturalistic driving assessment system that includes in-vehicle camera, accelerometers, and GPS, connected to the ODP port and a CPU that can be mounted in the trunk of the vehicle. No other contractor has experience collecting, storing, coding, reducing, and analyzing data of this nature. While the government retains unlimited data rights, it is not feasible for the government to take control of data storage, given its size and security requirements. To obtain the proposed data from a contractor other than VTTI, the government would need to (1) fund a full observational study that would cost millions of dollars and take many years and be highly duplicative; or (2) contract with an offeror that would subcontract with VTTI to provide data collection, coding, reduction and analyses, resulting in much higher costs to the government. This would be duplicative of costs and work already paid for by the existing contract with VTTI and would be redundant, time consuming, and expensive. However, if there are sources who feel they are able to perform the requirement, they must respond by submitting information (5 page limit) required in Numbered Note 22 within 45 days of publication of this synopsis. A determination by the Government not to compete this proposed requirement based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. The capability statement will be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement. Overnight deliveries should be mailed to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Contracts Management Branch, 6100 Executive Boulevard, Suite 7A07, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-7510. No collect calls or facsimile transmissions will be accepted. Respondents may submit their capability statements via email in addition to 2 hard copies