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Every year, nearly 12,000 people die in crashes when their car leaves its travel lane
on a rural road.
That's 30 people today, and every day.
If there were a way to help save the people behind those numbers, would you use it?
There are low-cost safety countermeasures proven to reduce rural roadway departure crashes.
The countermeasures help drivers stay in their lane, reduce the potential for crashes when
they do leave their lane, or minimize the severity of crashes if they happen.
However, a fundamental problem on rural roads is that crash locations change from year to year,
so it is hard to choose the best locations to install countermeasures.
Matthew Enders: "Especially as you leave the state highway system and start
looking at the local roadway system, there are a lot of roadway departure crashes
and there are a lot of serious crashes.
However, those are happening scattered over tens of thousands of miles of roadway
and so, zeroing in on any specific location that that's going to happen is not easy to do because
if you address the location that just had a fatality crash that's like that, the odds are really
slim that there's going to be another one in that exact same spot.
So that doesn't lend itself to being a good way to go about
addressing roadway departure crashes."
What if there were a way to address rural locations with the potential for a crash,
before the crash ever happens?
Fortunately, there are several tools to help identify locations on your network that are
at highest risk of future roadway departure crashes.
You can then target investments based on data and risk across an entire system.
State, local, and tribal agencies across the nation are beginning to use this systemic
approach to focus on reducing rural roadway departures in their communities.
They are seeing favorable results.
Thomas Mattson: "It really opened up my eyes, and my staff's eyes
to what our problems are across our system.
The systemic lets you step back and say, a problem can occur anywhere on my system, what are
the probabilities and what are my best methods of stopping that kind of problem
across the entire system?"
The process starts by analyzing crash and other data to look for characteristics that
most rural roadway departure crashes have in common.
Don Marr: "As we started getting more and more information compiled together,
a lot of trends started showing up.
From the time of day, the time of week, which months have more crashes, what type of accidents
we're having; it really started to come together, and you could start seeing patterns forming."
Panos Kokkas: "You can find commonalities.
If several occasions have the same type of incidents, you look at the engineering data.
What can I do to eliminate this? If not eliminate, reduce it?
But, our aim is to eliminate all incidents."
Systemic analysis can require less data than you may think.
Thomas Mattson: "Everybody has some data.
Use what you have to start.
If you have to get more data, go for it, but don't not do anything just because you don't
think you have enough data."
Once you identify high-risk locations, match safety countermeasures to address them
across your system.
Some proven countermeasures include enhanced delineation and signing, high-friction surface
treatment, rumble strips, and Safety Edge, among others.
The combination of countermeasures installed at targeted, high-risk locations is the key
to reducing roadway departures on your rural network.
Using this information to create a simple data-driven plan is especially helpful.
Kelly Patrick: "Having something in place that will help us justify, here are our priority projects,
and here is why it's our priority, I think will really help us get even more funding
and it will help us focus that funding that we do get onto
the projects that it needs to be focused on."
The goal is to prevent the next rural roadway departure crash from happening at all.
Thomas Mattson: "It's very, very difficult to sit in a room when there's been an accident with relatives
of that person who may have been deceased, saying
'Why didn't you do something before it happened?'
This gives me the ability to say, I am doing something before it happens to somebody else."
Thirty people will die today in rural roadway departure crashes.
These approaches and tools are proven to reduce them on roadways like yours.
Put them to work and let's save the people behind the numbers.
Contact FHWA today to learn more.
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