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• Traffic Safety Information Systems International Scan: Strategy Implementation White Paper

Traffic Safety Information Systems International Scan: Strategy Implementation White Paper

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Summary and Conclusions

The international safety data scanning tour organized and led by FHWA produced a detailed description of major safety data initiatives in Europe and Australia, and the accompanying implementation paper presented suggested strategies for bringing these and other initiatives and improvements to safety data in the United States. This paper has built on those documents by further describing major issues in U.S. safety data and by presenting a listing of detailed recommendations for improving these data. The text of this paper has been organized into the following five major strategies.

• Strategy 1—Increase support for both safety programs and safety information systems (the data) from top-level administrators in State and local transportation agencies.
• Strategy 2—Improve safety data by defining good inventory data and institutionalizing continual improvement toward established performance measures.
• Strategy 3—Improve safety data by making it easier to collect, store, and use.
• Strategy 4—Improve safety data by increasing the use of critical safety analysis tools, which themselves require good data.
• Strategy 5—Improve and protect safety data by storage and linkage with critical nonsafety data.

Recommended substrategies and actions have been presented for each of these five strategy areas. This final section presents the recommendations again, but reorganizes them by potentially responsible agency.

Recommendations by Potentially Responsible Agency

All recommendations from the five strategies have been captured in table 1 below. Although it is clear that many of the proposed strategies could be implemented by more than one agency, the strategies in table 1 are organized by the agency who, in the opinion of the authors, would be most likely to lead the implementation—FHWA alone, FHWA and AASHTO jointly, NHTSA and FHWA and FMCSA jointly, and the States. The bulk of the recommendations are directed to FHWA—alone and in partnership with AASHTO and NHTSA/FMCSA. This is primarily due to the fact that as noted earlier, this paper focused more on deficiencies in, and thus solutions to, roadway inventory and traffic data needs than on deficiencies in crash data needs.

In each case, an attempt has been made to provide an estimate of the time frame required to capture the full benefit of the recommendation (including both development and implementation timeframe), and the relative cost of implementing the strategy (low, medium, high). With respect to timeframe, short-term represents less than 2 years, medium-term represents 3 to 5 years, and long-term represents more than 5 years. Note, however, that in some medium-term and long-term cases, the actual development of the recommended action could be less than 2 years, but the implementation would require a long-term commitment. The cost-level estimates include both development efforts (e.g., a specific research effort) and implementation and maintenance costs.

to the sponsor. For reference, recommendations requiring a specific research project were defined as "medium cost." Again, these are only relative judgments to provide some input into decisions concerning programming of the recommendations.

Prioritization of Recommendations

All of these recommendations are considered important, or they would not be included in this paper. Initially, consideration was given to providing a further prioritization of the 38 recommendations captured in the above text by providing top-two recommendations for each responsible-agency group. However, this was not done for three reasons. First, it is extremely difficult to predict in advance which of the many recommendations will lead to the greatest improvements in safety data. Their ultimate benefit will depend on a number of factors including the success of necessary development efforts (e.g., research studies) and the degree to which the ultimate collectors of safety data—the State and local transportation agencies—implement a given recommended change. Second, this type of prioritization within a responsible-agency group could fail to recognize an even more important recommendation in a different group. Thus, a recommendation judged to be in the top two within one of the five strategy areas may not be as important as a strategy that did not make the top-two list in another strategy area. Third, there is some fear that paring down the full list of 41 recommendations to only 10 will ultimately result in the other 31 being denied the attention they deserve. As noted above, all are believed to be important, and presenting the full list will allow the responsible agencies to choose the ones they believe are most important and most feasible.

Given these concerns and after careful consideration, a decision was made to include a listing of most-important recommendations, which was determined by a focus group of safety data experts convened to review and discuss the draft version of this paper. The group consisted of eight State and local roadway safety engineers, crash data specialists, roadway inventory data specialists, and information technology experts. The list of focus group participants is included in appendix C. Following a detailed discussion by the group of all 38 recommendations present at the time of the meeting, each participant (including the authors and the FHWA Task Manager) rated each recommendation as "high," "medium," or "lower." Participants were asked to distribute their ratings so that approximately one-third were high, one-third were medium, and one-third were in the "lower" category. The rankings were then combined, and table 2 lists the highest-ranked 13 of the 38 recommendations, the top one-third.

Note that three recommendations were added after the panel meeting and were not rated by the panel: explicit recommendations for (1) States to regularly request traffic records assessments by an independent agency, (2) for STRCCs to report regularly to top-level administrators to raise agency awareness of records issues and needs, and (3) for FHWA, NHTSA, and FMCSA to explore with IACP the possibility of a safety training standard for police, similar to training standards for other aspects of police work. Finally, also note that the composition of the panel, which was weighted heavier to the roadway and inventory data rather than to crash data, clearly might have affected the rankings. Clearly, any other group may have developed a different priority list. Given all these caveats, table 2 provides at least some input concerning priorities from a group of national safety-data experts.

CONCLUSION

Excellent crash, roadway inventory, and traffic data are critical to making decisions concerning roadway planning, roadway design and improvement, vehicle design, and driver programs—all of which affect the safety of the driving public. Safety data will become even more critical as our national, State, and local departments of transportation, and indeed the entire safety field, move to more fact-based safety decisions and to performance-based programs. Current safety data will not meet these challenges in many cases. AASHTO recognized this fact in the publication Strategic Highway Safety Plan, where the core element of management included the need to (1) improve the information and decision support systems and (2) create more effective process and safety management systems. The recently passed SAFETEA-LU legislation has subsequently mandated improvements in safety data and includes provisions for Federal funding to help address some of the data issues presented in this paper.

This paper has described a number of issues with current data and a series of potential solutions to these issues. It is hoped that this description will not only increase the national discussion of how safety data can be improved, but that at least some of the solutions suggested will be implemented and will result in improvements in data that will lead to decisions that will help solve one of the largest public health problems faced by the United States—highway crashes.

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