Topics: Roadway Safety Assessments a.k.a. Roadway Safety Audits

Websites and Citations:

Roadway Safety Audit website at the FHWA.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Talking Traffic. My name is Bill Ruhsam and I host this podcast and it’s sister website, talkingtraffic.org. Today is January 5, 2014 and this is episode 43 of Talking Traffic. Today’s topic is Roadway Safety Assessments.

What is a roadway safety assessment, which are sometimes called Roadway Safety Audits? Well, it’s really exactly what it says. It’s an assessment of the safety of a segment of roadway. This segment might be a piece of a boulevard, or an intersection, or a tight curve in a rural location, or something else. A roadway safety assessment, which I will now call an RSA, is a process for looking at a possible safety issue and finding potential solutions that might address the problem.

Now, you have probably noticed that I’m using weasel words in that description. Words like “possible” and “potential” and “might”. There’s a reason for that, and it’s a reason that the RSA is designed to address. Here’s an anecdote from my personal experience:

There was an intersection in my county that happened to be within a roadway project I was the traffic engineer for. During our normal process of looking at all the intersections along the roadway, we analyzed that intersection for whether a traffic signal would be needed after the construction was complete. My conclusion was, No. No signal was needed. There wasn’t enough traffic, nor were there a number of crashes that could be addressed by a signal. Don’t forget, faithful listeners, that signals can *increase* the number of crashes that occur. That’s episode 12, where I also related this anecdote. Signals can increase the frequency of crashes, although they will generally decrease the *severity* of those crashes. However, if an intersection doesn’t *have* any severe crashes, than a new signal might increase the total number of crashes *and* injuries. That’s not a good situation. But, back to the intersection. When we went to the public meeting that was a part of the road project, I was asked at least four times when we were going to install a signal at that dangerous intersection. I kept answering no, we were not going to install a signal because it wasn’t warranted. Several attendees became a little short with me. After the meeting, I went back and did some more digging to see if there had been collisions out there that just hadn’t been reported, but to my knowledge, no additional crashes had occurred. This was an intersection that was perceived as dangerous, but wasn’t. Thusly why I’m using all these weasel words. Sometimes, when we’re looking for problems to solve, we have to be careful about requesting hot-spots from the public because we’ll get places like this one.

So an RSA is methodical look at a safety problem to determine what the root cause is, or if there are more than one, and how they can be addressed. Before I get much further along, you can stop right here and go to the Roadway Safety Audits website at the FHWA and read for yourself in a formal format exactly what they are. The website is http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/rsa/ and contains all the details.

There are a couple components of the RSA that distinguish it from a safety evaluation that I might do, or your local town might do on a regular basis. The RSA brings together a multidisciplinary, independent team to do the work. By multidisciplinary, I mean you may have a traffic engineer and a roadway engineer, but you’ll also have a cop who works road crashes, and the local maintenance supervisor, and an EMS first responder. The exact composition of the RSA team isn’t set in stone, but it’s important that a mix of expertise, and especially expertise that is outside of the engineering realm be represented.

The other component of the team that is important is independence. Often, a[...]