This issue of ITE Journal hits home for me. Traffic safety is the one topic that unites all ITE members, regardless of their background, where they live, or what their role is. Throughout my career, I have watched the evolution of our profession’s understanding of roadway safety. Back in the late 1990s, safety was a topic to be addressed in many corridor studies I performed. Back in those days, safety was about counting the number of crashes by location and looking for patterns. In many corridor studies, simply reviewing whether the roadway design met current standards was considered roadway safety. The presumption was that substandard design was less safe, and that bringing roadways up to standards would improve safety. This included designing roadways for higher speeds than posted. We were so naive! We didn’t understand that, unlike other engineering works, incorporating factors of safety would sometimes lead to higher speeds, which in turn increased kinetic energy and thus REDUCED safety. A few recent books have taken on this topic, including Overbuilt by Erick Guerra.
I remember back in the 1990s obtaining three years of crash reports for a six-mile state road—1,400 crash records—and having to make sense of it to identify issues and potential improvements (within the budget assigned). Making sense out of the chaos fascinated me. When I spotted a pattern, I asked one of my mentors, Walter Gardiner, what the causal factor and potential fix could be. He had been a city and county traffic engineer for most of his career before retiring and joining a consulting firm that he helped found on nights and weekends. Walter gave me insights (which I wrote down). He had a rule of thumb that each signalized intersection was entitled to one crash per million entering vehicles before it had a crash problem. In 2010, along came the Highway Safety Manual. Many of Walter’s lessons proved right on the mark! Roadway
Safety Professional certifications and the science of roadway safety followed.
Despite our improved understanding of the science of roadway safety, we haven’t been seeing safer outcomes on roadways in recent years. Roadway fatalities remain stubbornly high, especially among vulnerable road users. I became a forensic expert nine years ago, and more than half of the cases I am engaged in involve pedestrians or bicyclists struck by vehicles. I have had an up-close view of how life-altering these crashes can be, even if they don’t result in a fatality.
The Safe System Approach represents a paradigm shift in roadway safety. Within this paradigm, we accept that humans will make errors and build redundancies in our systems. As a teenager, the radio station I listened to played Rush constantly. To quote Rush (a band I heard constantly on my favorite radio station growing up), “Philosophers and ploughmen, each must know his part to sow a new mentality closer to the Heart...” With that lesson, we cannot create safer roadways by ourselves. It takes multiple stakeholders working together to achieve safe roadways. ITE has accepted this challenge through our ITE Safety Roadmap and Action Plan. It includes 30 new initiatives, each intended to improve the understanding of a different aspect of roadway safety for our members. Can we achieve this lofty goal? Sure, if we get at least 100 new volunteers from our membership to help. If you want to be one of these brave hundreds and help achieve safer outcomes ITE and the whole world need you right now! Volunteer by visiting www.ite.org/safetyroadmap and scrolling down to “Getting Involved.”