Tackling the Road Safety Crisis: Saving Lives Through Research and Action (2024)
Chapter: 6 Recommendations
6
Recommendations
The United States faces a road safety crisis: fatal crashes per mile traveled have been climbing for the past decade, and crashes involving vulnerable road users—pedestrians, bicyclists, and others who share the roads with motor vehicles—have grown the fastest. Minority communities have suffered disproportionally. These developments are alarming, and especially so when considering that road safety has been improving throughout much of the rest of the world such that most other developed countries have road fatality rates that are now much lower than those of the United States.
Research is vital to understanding the road safety challenge and to finding solutions, but the research must be well designed and produce credible results that are effectively disseminated and implemented in the field. This report considers whether the road safety research enterprise is fulfilling this critical role by conducting the right research, doing it well, and putting the results in the hands of transportation engineers, planners, designers, and policymakers committed to reversing these troubling trends. To do so, the report has reviewed the process by which road safety research is programmed, conducted, evaluated, and disseminated, and deployed, as well as how experience from the field is monitored and scrutinized to guide future research. The review was conducted with eye to whether and how the process ensures that needed road safety research is being done, yields a cost-effective basis for reducing traffic fatalities and injuries, and delivers products that can be and are readily and efficiently applied by practitioners when appropriately informed, trained, and equipped to make the best use of the products.
The report uncovers important gaps and shortcomings in this process while identifying opportunities to address them. 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.
Federally funded U.S. road safety research is programmed by multiple entities in a largely independent manner. Each entity sets priorities and programs research investments without guidance from a well-defined and coordinated plan for resolving the most critical problems arising from crash experience. The result is a fragmented collection of projects that do not ensure that key safety issues are being systematically addressed to have maximum effect in reducing total roadway fatalities and serious injuries. Further, there is often overlap or the potential for overlap in the funded projects. In the absence of such a guiding plan, the basis for choosing funded projects can be ill-defined and the impacts of the projects and programs that sponsor them can be difficult to assess. By way of example, the federally funded and state-programmed National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) sponsors road safety projects every year. The projects are selected, and their funding levels are determined by American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ (AASHTO’s) Committee on Research and Innovation (R&I Committee) based on problem statements submitted by states and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Although AASHTO itself has a Strategic Highway Safety Plan, it is not connected to the NCHRP safety project selection process, and the R&I Committee chooses projects from those submitted by State DOTs based on annual priorities.
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 is coordinated across programming entities. More data-driven, transparent, and coordinated safety research programming is necessary to ensure that critical research needs are addressed and to facilitate accountability with the road safety community and general public.
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, and including trucking), experts in road safety and its intersection with medicine and public health, behavioral sciences, law enforcement, and the academic and industry safety research community.
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 effectiveness of many crash countermeasures has been confirmed through research and documented in the Highway Safety Manual, which is published by AASHTO to provide a science-based, technical source of information for assessing safety performance when making highway planning, design, operations, and maintenance decisions. FHWA has developed related implementation tools including the Crash Modification Factors (CMF) Clearinghouse, and Systemic Safety Project Selection Tool. These tools are intended to support state and local highway agencies in making quantitative assessments of candidate safety measures along with other performance interests such as traffic operations, environmental impacts, and pavement durability.
The committee observes, however, that some countermeasures employed for safety purposes are not supported by research having a strong empirical basis. Notably, the CMF Clearinghouse contains conflicting information about the expected performance of crash countermeasures, indicative of the database’s reliance on information that is inconsistently supported by evidence-based research. Furthermore, the CMF Clearinghouse does not contain information on the full range of interventions being used for safety purposes that are not currently supported by evidence-based research, including alternative roadway design and operating concepts.
The ongoing program would validate and update information about the effectiveness of interventions, while covering more variations in context and conditions, such as the importance of the roles that different Safe System partners play in these interventions (i.e., planning, engineering, public health). The program would fill existing evidentiary gaps while also supporting new and updated evaluations that take into account 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 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 that can reflect local experience and be qualitative in nature.
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 the 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 easier to apply. To facilitate access to this unified guidance, it could be structured to be an online product, supported with an interactive help function.
The revised guidance and tools could be designed to support implementation of the Safe System Approach, building on the collaborations underway by FHWA, AASHTO, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Ideally, the unified guidance would facilitate the routine updating of road safety guidance with new ideas and information from research, practice, and policy. The effort could start with FHWA’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ urban street design guides, and AASHTO’s Highway Safety Manual and A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets.
Even if limited to this guidance initially, the unification effort promises to be a large and complicated process, requiring careful planning, collaborative management, and significant investments. Such an effort will require the leadership of U.S. DOT and collaboration of a wide array of
stakeholders, including states (through AASHTO), counties, municipalities, the professional community (e.g., the Institute of Transportation Engineers [ITE]), and representatives of the motor vehicle industry and road users (motorized and nonmotorized). Here again, the body recommended to develop the National Road Safety Research Agenda could be enlisted to support the needed collaboration. The work itself would be contracted to qualified entities.
RECOMMENDATION 4: The U.S. Department of Transportation should sponsor the development of curricula for interdisciplinary road safety education and training for both academic and professional development programs.
Road safety education needs to prepare transportation engineers and planners to use the engineering and analytic tools to identify safety problems and interventions. They need to be trained to balance the safety and capacity consequences of roadway designs and operating principles and have the technical skills to maximize safety rather than focusing solely on complying with established standards.
While the focus of this recommendation is on training engineers who are on the frontlines of selecting and delivering crash countermeasures, this effort should include developing curricular components to support road safety education in public health, law enforcement and other fields to grow the community of professionals and researchers with basic knowledge about road safety.
University civil engineering departments have long been the primary source of trained transportation engineers, but their road safety offerings are often limited, as the traditional educational experience focuses on designing for and managing capacity and level of service for motor vehicle traffic. Indeed, some university civil engineering programs do not address safety at all, while others do so only qualitatively as part of transportation planning courses. Supplemental technical training on road safety is available in short courses offered by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the National Highway Institute (NHI),1 and some universities, but practitioner uptake of these programs is limited.
The recommended effort should include not only the development and dissemination of curricula, but guidance on knowledge and skill requirements and the integration of road safety knowledge into certification processes including Professional Engineering examinations. The curricular
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1 The National Highway Institute is FHWA’s education and training branch. For more information see https://www.nhi.fhwa.dot.gov/about-nhi.
materials should therefore be developed to be suitable for both traditional academic programs and short courses for professional training.
The road safety community should share the responsibility to encourage professionals to take advantage of expanded opportunities and resources for training. Key collaborators beyond ITE could include NHI, the FHWA Resource Center, U.S. DOT Technology Transfer Program, and universities with programs in transportation engineering and planning.2 Here again, curricular development could be accomplished through contracts with universities, professional societies, and consultants.
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 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, such as within an existing non-profit research entity, university transportation research center, or contract laboratory (much like the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratories). In any case, the center would need to be afforded sufficient resources and the independence to act to advance the interests of the broad array of road safety experts and interests charged with developing the National Road Safety Research Agenda. The center’s fundamental mission 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 motor vehicle crashes.
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2 An example of training safety professionals across several disciplines consistent with a Safe System approach includes A First-of-Its-Kind Opportunity | Clemson University, South Carolina. https://www.clemson.edu/graduate/academics/mtsa.
CONCLUDING COMMENT
Previous studies have addressed the topics central to this report, and 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 have 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 developments can no longer be dismissed as temporary setbacks when their human, social, and economic costs have become so high. There is a growing audience for solutions to the country’s road safety crisis and a growing recognition that well-targeted and evidence-based research that can be translated into practice must play a prominent role in finding and fielding these solutions.
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