Roadway Safety Best Practices
Roadway safety is an important part of all transportation improvement projects. Identifying historical crash locations and the factors influencing them enables the enhancement of safety for all road users through engineering improvements. KLJ’s traffic professionals employ a range of technical tools to analyze this safety data to make our roads safer. Below are examples of traditional and innovative methods we use.
Historical Trends: State Departments of Safety (DOS) and Departments of Transportation (DOT) receive all reported crashes within each state, incorporating them into statewide datasets. These databases can be used to understand the type, severity, location, and other factors to understand why historical crashes occur at specific intersections or road segments. Using historical crash data helps identify locations with the highest magnitude or increasing frequency of crashes over a specific timeline (usually 5-year trends).
Safety Risk Factors: The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) identifies several potential risk factors that can be used to categorize large datasets of existing roadways to identify where roadway design features can influence higher crash or severity exposure. Key factors include roadway widths, speed limits, roadway curves, lighting, access, volume, and more. Agencies can use this information to identify the most at-risk locations and develop county or districtwide strategies to prioritize improvement funding.
Innovative Safety Analysis Tools: Recently, various tools have been developed to quantify surrogate safety, the analysis of potential crash factors rather than actual crashes, on a more detailed level than a simple risk factor analysis. These tools can pull in detailed conflicts between vehicles and pedestrians to understand how many close calls actually occur based on site specific information. These include specific vehicle pattern conflicts, when pedestrian crossings occur, blind spots at crossings, and the speed and deceleration of vehicles. Using video analytics and artificial intelligence, these tools can quantify large sets of data into specific patterns to address with improvements and compare the necessity of improvements between locations.
KLJ has performed numerous safety analyses across the Mountain-West and Midwest regions, incorporating factors like conservative driving behaviors, wildlife crossing safety, addressing lack of multimodal facilities, among others. Utilizing FHWA’s safe system approach, our safety improvements incorporate redundancies to address when a driver, vehicle, or roadway element fails increasing the chances of a crash. KLJ is committed to enhancing roadway safety in the areas we serve and offers guidance to help others to have similar safety benefits.
