professional practices. For example, there is a trend toward balancing the needs of motorists, other road users, and communities.

This report uncovers important gaps and shortcomings in this process and identifies opportunities to address them. These include making road safety a true priority for action by highway agencies consistent with the Safe System Approach and its multi-pronged pursuit of zero road fatalities; breaking down silos between parallel research and action programs to build an integrated road safety strategy; and pursuing these ends through the collaboration of the broad, multi-disciplinary community of experts in such fields as roadway and vehicle engineering, public health and medicine, human behavior studies, and law enforcement. This will require a coordinated, disciplined, interagency effort by multiple champions working together to promote a renewed transportation safety culture across highway agencies.

Previous studies have addressed the road safety concerns central to this report, in some cases making similar recommendations for action. Those recommendations, by and large, were not pursued even as the country’s long-term gains in road safety waned and since collapsed into the current crisis. The coordinated set of actions recommended in this report is intended to achieve more impactful outcomes that can be sustained over time, as recent trends in highway injuries and fatalities can no longer be dismissed as temporary setbacks when their human, social, and economic costs have become so high. This committee, and its predecessors conclude that, with the right changes in strategy, well targeted and evidence-based research can be translated into practice and actions to make meaningful advances in U.S. road safety.

The following recommendations are offered with these opportunities in mind. All are directed to the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT), urging the exercise of leadership in motivating, coordinating, and sponsoring—in effect, “rallying”—the involvement of the many parties integral to the road safety practice and research enterprises and to the implementation of research results in the field.

RECOMMENDATION 1: The U.S. Department of Transportation should establish and support a collaborative and transparent process that is dedicated to defining road safety research priorities across all federally funded research programs. The priorities should be set forth in a regularly updated National Road Safety Research Agenda developed by an independent body responsible for identifying and integrating priorities informed by data-driven methods.

While U.S. road safety research has a productive history, persistent gaps in research agendas in relation to national crash outcomes is indicative of

the lack of national-level guidance in road safety research planning and programming. In particular, there is a need for guidance that is data-driven and for project selection processes that are deliberate in consulting this guidance and that are coordinated across programming entities. The recommended National Road Safety Research Agenda should be a collaborative product of a standing committee of representatives of organizations with a keen interest in advancing road safety through research, including federal, state, and local transportation agencies, advocates for road users (motorized and nonmotorized), experts in road safety and its intersection with public health and medicine, and with the academic and industry safety research communities.

RECOMMENDATION 2: The U.S. Department of Transportation should establish a program to support rigorous, ongoing evaluations of the effectiveness of new and commonly deployed crash countermeasures.

The committee observes that some countermeasures employed for safety purposes are not supported by research having a strong empirical basis. The ongoing program would validate and update information about the effectiveness of interventions, while covering more variations in context and conditions. The program would fill existing evidentiary gaps while also supporting new and updated evaluations that account for changes in roadway and vehicle designs and technologies, as well as driver behaviors. This program could be implemented through contracts with multiple research organizations but coordinated in a manner sufficient to ensure consistent high-quality research. The prioritization of countermeasures for review could be informed by the independent body that sets the recommended National Road Safety Research Agenda. This would be an ongoing research program funded at a level that is at least sufficient to assess the most commonly deployed countermeasures within a 10-year time frame.

RECOMMENDATION 3: The U.S. Department of Transportation should integrate and harmonize the key guidance used by practitioners to inform their selection of crash countermeasures.

Road safety practitioners lack simplified, easy-to-use procedures and tools to support the analysis, selection and design of contextually appropriate crash countermeasures. They confront multiple, often complex, and sometimes conflicting sources of guidance for the selection of countermeasures. This situation has led some states and municipalities, intent on addressing immediate needs, to adapt this guidance or develop their own guidance resources—with or without a strong evidence basis—that reflects

local experience and support. While it may not be possible to simplify the task of selecting crash countermeasures to make the decision easy, the guidance should be unified to a degree that supports efficient and context-appropriate decisions. For this purpose, the major current collection of resources and analysis tools could be integrated into a single product, or one-stop source of practitioner guidance, that is designed to be more accessible and readily applied. Revised guidance and tools are needed to support implementation of systems safety analysis, building on the collaborations underway by FHWA, AASHTO, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

RECOMMENDATION 4: The U.S. Department of Transportation should sponsor the development of curricula for road safety education and training for both academic and professional development programs.

The recommended effort should include not only the development and dissemination of curricula, but also guidance on knowledge, competency, and skill requirements and the integration road safety knowledge into certification processes including Professional Engineering examinations and other certifications, such as the Road Safety Professional certification offered by the Transportation Professional Certification Board. The curricular materials should be developed to be suitable for both traditional academic programs and short courses for professional training. They should address matters of engineering, data analysis tools, psychology of risk, sociology of community action and resistance, and the roles of public health and law enforcement. Components of the curriculum should be adapted for educational use in these and other relevant fields. Key collaborators could include ITE, the National Highway Institute (NHI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), public health professionals, prevention researchers, the U.S. DOT Technology Transfer Program, the FHWA Resource Center, and universities with programs in transportation engineering and planning.

RECOMMENDATION 5: To implement the recommendations in this report, the U.S. Department of Transportation should consider standing up a National Road Safety Research Center, seeking the needed resources from Congress as appropriate.

While the actions recommended above could be implemented by U.S. DOT through contracts with research institutes, consultants, and/or or universities, a potentially efficient and better coordinated approach would be to stand up a National Road Safety Research Center with a focused

mission to promote road safety research and its translation to practice. Such a center would create synergies among these key road safety functions while demonstrating a strong national commitment to road safety and road safety research. U.S. DOT would have many options for housing the center, the mission of which would be to support the technical resources, guidance, tools, research products, and skilled workforce needed to make early and sustained progress in the quest for zero deaths and injuries from traffic-related crashes.

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