The National Academies
11/11/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 11/11/2024 09:15
Strengthening Safety on U.S. Roadways
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Strengthening Safety on U.S. Roadways
Feature Story| November 11, 2024
By Sara Frueh
Over the past decade, America's roads have been getting more dangerous. The rate of fatal crashes per mile traveled has been climbing, and crashes involving vulnerable road users - such as pedestrians and bicyclists - have grown the fastest. Last year, an estimated 40,990 people lost their lives in traffic accidents in the U.S., according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
These developments are alarming, especially given that road safety has been improving in many other high-income nations, says a recent National Academies report.
"If you look at the crash rates and the fatality rates in high-income countries around the world - Canada, Australia, European nations - the U.S. death rates are two to four times higher, and for some comparisons five times higher," said Joseph Schofer, professor emeritus at Northwestern University, and chair of the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report.
Why is this gap so large? It's not that other countries know some secret to traffic safety that we don't, Schofer said. "There are no international boundaries to the research literature, so whatever they know, we know," he said. "There's good information out there that we're not using."
Moving safety research into practice
The new report identifies ways to improve the way research findings are translated into practice in the U.S. "There are multiple places where the flow of information to safety practitioners slows down, or stops, or doesn't work very well," said Schofer. "In our study, we found some strategic opportunities to make that flow work better."
While the federal government can play a key role in providing guidance, leadership, and funding for countermeasures that can help prevent crashes, most decisions that directly impact road safety - setting and enforcing speed limits and deciding how to design intersections, for example - are made at the state and local levels. Getting the right guidance to practitioners at these levels is essential, the committee's report says.
Currently, when a road safety professional at the state or local level faces a high crash rate or high-risk situation, they encounter multiple and sometimes conflicting sources of information and advice. They lack simple, easy-to-use procedures and tools to guide the choice of situationally relevant and feasible crash countermeasures.
The U.S. Department of Transportation can help solve that problem by investing in the integration of research findings and guidance to make it easier for practitioners to find evidence-based solutions, the report says.
Unequal Safety Risks
The risks of motor vehicle fatalities are borne unevenly across America's population, the report says. A negative correlation has been found between road fatality rates and income - wealthier people face lower risks. Studies have shown that the risk of traffic death is higher for Black and Hispanic communities. Rural residents face a higher risk as well; while only 20% of the U.S. population lives in rural areas, 40% of traffic fatalities occur outside cities.
"The federal government ought to sponsor an effort to harmonize multiple sources of guidance, to create a 'one-stop shopping' information source," said Schofer. "This might take advantage of AI tools to match problem and solution, with the objective of making the practitioner's job easier and more efficient."
Educating engineers for safety
Another challenge is that state transportation agencies often struggle to find skilled professionals to do work on roadway safety, said Schofer. "One of the reasons for this is that in the colleges and universities - particularly in engineering programs - it's not common to teach traffic safety analysis and planning in traffic engineering courses."
"We train people how to push more traffic through a road segment, with too little emphasis on how to make transportation serve communities better," he continued. To make it easier for instructors to bring road safety into their courses, the report suggests that DOT sponsor the development of curricula for road safety education and training - materials that would be suitable both for university programs and professional development courses.
Changing the culture of roadway management
Educating engineers to focus on road safety is part of what should be a larger shift toward prioritizing safety, Schofer explained.
"There are a variety of evidence-based interventions that aren't widely adopted," he said. For example, roundabouts are the preferred solution for reducing intersection crashes; while they may raise the rate of sideswipe crashes, they reduce the rate of T-bone crashes, which are much more dangerous. Similarly, automated speed enforcement, which is known to be highly effective, is rejected or even prohibited in certain places.
"Some communities resist new, more aggressive safety interventions, and sometimes engineers don't want change," Schofer said. Better understanding of the costs of rejecting proven crash countermeasures may help shift those decisions, he noted.
Federal leadership could help make a difference in terms of building a stronger safety culture in agencies and among professionals, Schofer said. "What you need is somebody who's willing to stand up and say, 'What we're doing now is costing lives unnecessarily, so we need to do something different.' We shouldn't continue to accept these deaths as a routine cost of doing business."
Unifying the nation's approach to road safety
Currently, research on road safety is conducted across several parallel programs without an overall strategy. The report recommends the establishment of an integrated, national road safety research strategy developed through participation of all major road users and managers.
The report urges the federal government to consider creating a National Road Safety Research Center - a government-funded entity with the mission to promote road safety research and its translation into practice. The center would develop the technical resources, guidance, tools, and research products, and help build the skilled workforce needed to make lasting progress in reducing traffic deaths and injuries.
"Bringing all these ideas together in one place would increase communication and coordination and form the point of a spear to bring roadway deaths down in the United States," said Schofer.
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