TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Web-Only Document 252: A Strategic Approach to Transforming Traffic Safety Culture to Reduce Deaths and Injuries provides guidance on developing a strategic approach to transform the traffic safety culture of road users and stakeholders. The goal is to use this approach to sustain improvements in traffic safety for all road users, including non-motorized users. For the purpose of this project, traffic safety culture is defined as the values and ...

TRB E-Circular 236: National Academies–TRB Forum on Preparing for Automated Vehicles and Shared Mobility summarizes the deliberations of a TRB forum launched in early 2018 to facilitate evidence-based research needed to deploy automated vehicle technologies in a manner and timeframe that informs policy to meet long-term goals. The deployments of automated vehicles, shared mobility services, and other transformational transportation technologies have the potential to dramatically increase safety, reduce c...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that summarizes a workshop that took place in January 2018 that explored best practices and lessons learned from other high-risk industries to help address safety concerns in the offshore oil industry. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop. Since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill, efforts to improve safety in the offshore oil industry have resulted in the adoption o...

TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exporatory Analysis (IDEA) program has released Safety Report 32: Railroad Bridge Inspections for Maintenance and Replacement Prioritization Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Laser Scanning Capabilities. Measuring bridge movement under trains in the field is difficult and expensive because a fixed reference point is not normally available, thus creating the need to erect independent scaffolding to create good reference points near the bridge from where to ...

TRB’s Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board has released 18 early access papers addressing safety issues, including: Identification of Site Characteristics for Proactive High-Friction Surface Treatment Site Selection using Sensor-Based, Detailed, Location-Referenced Curve Characteristics Data ( link ) Safety Evaluation of Destination Lighting Treatment at Stop Controlled Cross-Intersections ( link ) Situation Awareness Fast-Tracking, Including Identifying Escape Rou...

Twenty-seven percent of fatal crashes occur at horizontal curves, although they account for less than 10 percent of public roadway miles. Knowing where horizontal curves are located and their geometric characteristics are key to successfully addressing curve safety issues. Curve information is also essential for accurate placement of warning signs as safety treatment, especially where a curve has a history of crashes. To help states identify curve information, a tool called CurveFinder automatically iden...

TRB Special Report 323: In-Service Performance Evaluation of Guardrail End Treatments develops a research design for evaluating the in-service performance of guardrail end treatments and other roadside safety devices and identifies the data required to do so. Given the substantial data requirements and methodological challenges of conducting successful evaluations of particular end treatments, the committee concludes that state highway agencies will require more information about the benefits, costs, and...

In 2012, Congress gave the U.S. Federal Transit Administration (FTA) the authority to establish a new comprehensive framework to oversee the safety of the country’s public transit systems. As part of that framework, state and local transit agencies are required to engage in safety planning. In the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015, Congress asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to evaluate and provide recommendations on whether it is in the public interest ...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 515: Practices for Preventing Roadway Departures identifies and summarizes practices being used by state departments of transportation (DOTs) to prevent roadway departure crashes and to identify the data-driven advantages and disadvantages of these practices. More than half of all traffic fatalities result from roadway departure crashes. This type of crash occurs after a vehicle crosses an edge line or centerline or otherwise leaves th...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) has released a pre-publication, non-edited version of Synthesis 527: Resilience in Transportation Planning, Engineering, Management, Policy, and Administration. The report documents resilience efforts and how they are organized, understood, and implemented within transportation agencies’ core functions and services. Core functions and services include planning, engineering, construction, maintenance, operations, and administration. The informati...