Traffic / Safety (Andres Alvarez)

The FHWA is responsible for carrying out several highway safety programs. These safety programs provide funding for projects which remove, relocate, or shield roadside obstacles, identify and correct hazardous locations, eliminate or reduce hazards at railroad crossings, and improve signing, pavement markings, and signalization. The Agency promotes and administers highway-related safety guidelines providing for the identification and surveillance of accident locations; highway design, construction, and maintenance; traffic engineering services; and highway-related aspects of pedestrian safety. In Puerto Rico, we work closely with State of Puerto Rico Department of Transportation and Public Facilities to improve the safety of the motoring public, pedestrians, and highway workers.

Puerto Rico’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan

The Strategic Highway Safety Plan, or SHSP, is a statewide, data-driven plan that provides a coordinated framework for reducing fatalities and serious injuries on all Puerto Rico’s public roads. The SHSP strategically establishes statewide goals, objectives, challenge areas, and key actions to address Puerto Rico’s most pressing safety problems, and builds upon the strategies established by federal, state, regional, local, and private sector safety stakeholders from throughout the state.

More information can be found at Puerto Rico Strategic Highway Safety Plan.

Puerto Rico’s Highway Safety Improvement Program

The primary purpose of the program is to provide a coordinated national highway safety program through financial assistance to the State that will accelerate traffic safety programs. The program requires that a state maintain a safety program in accordance with uniform standards established by the Secretary of Transportation.

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)

Highway engineering organizations and the motoring public are requiring timely, accurate, and readily accessible information on the extent of congestion.

More information can be found at Live Traffic in Puerto Rico Highways.

Highway Safety Manual

The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) introduces a science-based technical approach that takes the guesswork out of safety analysis. The HSM provides tools to conduct quantitative safety analyses, allowing for safety to be quantitatively evaluated alongside other transportation performance measures, such as traffic operations, environmental impacts, and construction costs.

For example, the HSM provides a method to quantify changes in crash frequency as a function of cross-sectional features of a roadway. With this method, the expected change in crash frequency of different design alternatives can be compared with the operational benefits or environmental impacts of the same alternatives. As another example, the costs of constructing a left-turn lane on a two-lane road can be compared to the safety benefits in terms of reducing a certain number of crashes.

The HSM will support states' progress toward Federal, state and local safety goals to reduce fatalities and serious injuries. As public agencies work toward their safety goals, the quantitative methods in the HSM can be used to evaluate which programs and project improvements are achieving their intended results, and agencies can reallocate funds toward those with the greatest safety benefits.

More information can be found on the HSM and to participate in the national dialogue on HSM applications, go to: www.highwaysafetymanual.org