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Rural Highway Safety 
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December 2007 – Vol. 1, No. 3
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Rural Safety News is an electronic newsletter of the Center for Excellence in Rural Safety (CERS) at the University of Minnesota. Rural Safety News brings you the latest research and resources concerning rural safety. In this issue: CERS to publish first research summary about rural transportation safety planning The first in a series of CERS research summaries examines the current state of safety planning through a comprehensive review of Strategic Highway Safety Plans (SHSPs) and supporting documents from selected states around the nation. Previous research has examined the effectiveness of policies and engineering solutions to traffic safety problems. Safety professionals and policymakers are particularly concerned because rural roadways annually claim more lives than urban roads do. Rural Transportation Safety and the Strategic Highway Safety Plan: An Examination of Select State Programs and Practices, by CERS director Lee Munnich and research assistant Alec More, will be published next month. The research summary will be available for download from the CERS Web site with additional information, including state case studies. Print copies will also be available. Federal legislation typically has included funding for safety planning and engineering measures, yet the thrust of these efforts has focused primarily on the needs of urban and suburban transportation systems. Not until Congress passed SAFETEA-LU in 2005 did the federal government fund research and require states to report on rural roads, where crashes annually claim the most lives. New federal requirements mandate that all states develop SHSPs in an effort to reduce the number of roadway fatalities and serious injury crashes. The SHSP is intended to serve as a multi-agency “umbrella” plan, uniting existing transportation safety plans and programs operated by different state agencies. The researchers took several steps to develop a knowledge base of existing conditions pertaining to safety planning in six states, selected to represent different regions across the United States. These states are Alabama, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota, Vermont, and Washington. Based on the research effort, Munnich and More established five key findings from a comprehensive review of the plans and supporting documents:
In addition to these findings, case studies of each state provide a synopsis of certain aspects of their SHSPs. Recommendations concerning the SHSP development process and emphasis areas are also provided. Recommendations include strengthening public engagement activities and initiatives to communicate the importance of roadway safety, reviewing the development structure and safety stakeholders involved, and continuing integration across agencies contributing to safety. Related resources:  Cultural factors seen as crucial to improving rural safety
Mick Rakauskas In rural areas of the United States, the goal of reducing traffic-related fatalities and serious injuries presents a different set of challenges than in urban areas, according to researchers with the University of Minnesota’s HumanFIRST Program. Researchers Mick Rakauskas and Nic Ward recently completed a study of rural and urban “safety cultures,” an effort they hope will support the development of more effective safety interventions to reduce the large number of crashes in rural areas. The researchers surveyed drivers in three urban and three rural Minnesota counties about their driving habits and their opinions of safety practices such as seat belt use and driving under the influence of alcohol. The results demonstrated statistically significant differences between the two groups, which could help inform the development of new safety programs. A final report on the research is available from the Center for Transportation Studies. Although rural areas are culturally diverse, the report cites previous research showing rural residents typically exhibit some of the same cultural characteristics, including strong informal social control, high density acquaintanceship, conservative and deterministic views, mistrust of government, and reluctance to share internal problems. While it would be misleading to speak of a single rural (or urban) safety culture, Rakauskas and Ward believe that understanding broad patterns of attitude and behavior is important to addressing problems effectively. Cultural factors are often passed down from generation to generation, with children picking up their parents’ attitudes. In the case of driving, children absorb their parents’ perspectives before they are old enough to get behind the wheel themselves. As a result, attitudes and behavioral norms are strongly rooted and difficult to alter—even in the face of concerted efforts to change the way people think about traffic safety. For example, rural drivers in the study generally ascribed less risk to driving without seat belts and reported wearing belts less frequently than urban drivers. The research paid particular attention to one icon of rural life: the pickup truck. Prompted by data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indicating much lower levels of seat belt use among pickup drivers, the researchers found that rural pickup drivers saw less risk in not wearing safety belts compared to urban pickup drivers. Rural pickup drivers also reported wearing belts less frequently than their urban pickup driver counterparts. With cultural factors in mind, the researchers suggest that safety advocates and policymakers should continue to work together in developing rural safety programs that work with rural culture, rather than against it. For example, rather than attempting to change behavioral norms through “top-down” regulation, a “bottom-up” approach that focuses on increasing the perceived risks of dangerous driving behaviors might be more effective. If risk perceptions can be changed, rural communities are likely to discourage unsafe practices through their strong social networks. Addressing a breakfast meeting of stakeholders in the Toward Zero Deaths program, Ward outlined the cultural differences between rural and urban areas and important factors that must be considered in rolling out effective traffic safety programs beyond the city limits. Driving-related deaths often have a huge social impact in small rural communities, Ward explained, in particular when they involve young drivers. Such tragedies often touch almost all the area’s residents because the social fabric of these communities is tightly knit,. However, he said, it is this very cohesion and sense of community that often makes it difficult to focus educational efforts on these crashes—community members may feel that efforts at education stemming from a recent loss of life are simply too painful for the families and friends of the victims. This emotional resistance to focusing on the deaths of friends and loved ones, while natural, can hamper efforts to improve community awareness of issues such as speeding or drunk driving. Another potential obstacle to the implementation of traffic safety programs in rural areas, Ward said, is a deep-seated culture of skepticism toward perceived governmental intervention in local affairs. Policies and programs that are seen as being imposed by a remote authority—whether in the state capital or Washington, D.C.—are likely to be greeted with suspicion by many rural residents who resent “big government” regulations. In the researchers’ survey results, rural drivers consistently saw less utility in safety interventions than urban residents. Ward also highlighted political considerations frequently encountered in small communities that can hamper the adoption of tough enforcement or educational efforts. An outgrowth of the close-knit structure of rural communities is the fact that many law enforcement and political figures face stiff opposition when they “rock the boat” by introducing aggressive efforts. For a rural sheriff or small-town mayor, this opposition can take the form of fewer votes on election day, creating a powerful disincentive to address problems. Ward said this observation should not be generalized to all rural areas, and that many local law enforcement officers and politicians have proven to be extremely supportive of aggressive efforts to improve road safety. Rather than looking at rural cultural characteristics as an obstacle to achieving better traffic safety, Rakauskas and Ward recommend that stakeholders approach the issue as another factor that can contribute to successful implementations. Only by understanding the psychological and cultural factors that affect traffic safety in rural areas will it be possible to achieve profound reductions in driving-related fatalities and serious injuries. Related resources:
Profiles in Rural Safety: Idaho addresses rural EMS challenges In Idaho, a 26-year-old ambulance was serving more than 800 square miles of the state. But Dia Gainor, Idaho Emergency Medical Services Bureau chief, said the large rural area depending on the worn-out vehicle’s emergency service couldn’t possibly hold enough bake sales to raise the kind of money needed to purchase a new ambulance. To solve the problem, Gainor said the state added a one-dollar per year fee to driver’s licenses to help rural areas update their EMS. The ambulance was retired two years ago. The story illustrates the challenges stemming from an all-too-familiar disparity between urban and rural EMS, and an innovative response, which Gainor said is one of many Idaho is using to improve medical care for rural residents. For urban support of such efforts, Gainor is quick to explain that many city dwellers treasure the opportunity to travel to rural areas for recreation or for work, and that they ought to be safe when they pursue those interests. “They should have no less confidence in the EMS system in rural areas than when they’re in the city,” she said. In most states, EMS bureaus are the “new kids on the block,” according to Gainor. Most of these offices weren’t created until the 1970s, but they serve as a major intersection linking public health, public safety, and emergency medicine. And unlike police and fire, EMS is regulated at the state level, so states have the ability to effect change at the local levels with their initiatives. The disparity between urban and rural EMS is one of the biggest problems facing states today, Gainor said. In addition to the distance to hospitals and access to physicians in emergency situations, the training level of those responding to emergencies is often troubling. Urban EMS has the highest level of sophistication and many more career paramedics on staff. Rural EMS in most states consists of volunteers with only 110 clock hours of training. Gainor pointed out that there is no such thing as a volunteer deputy sheriff in Idaho. “Law enforcement is too precious of a public utility to rely on a vulnerable volunteer population,” she said. Though EMS is not federally regulated, the Office of Emergency Medical Services at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is, Gainor said, the closest thing to a lead agency. NHTSA leadership on several key initiatives, she added, is sure to improve rural EMS by addressing the quality of emergency medical service, which varies significantly from community to community and state to state. For instance, NHTSA is leading a complete overhaul of national EMS standards with what Gainor calls a “revolutionary” change in the underlying training. Instead of publishing a national standard curriculum, the new approach will provide a scope-of-practice model identifying skills emergency responders are expected to perform. EMS in every state must examine their structural elements to ensure improved quality of care for patients, Gainor said. She emphasized that there is not one area to single out for improvement—EMS must look at a bigger picture of the functionality of their system. In particular, she advised looking at areas such as the number of workers, education, clinical sophistication, equipment, and data collection. To help improve EMS across the country, Gainor discussed the use of the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS), a national repository that will store EMS data from every state at the National Crash Analysis Center (NCAC). This NHTSA-led and funded effort, to which every state except for New York has agreed to participate, aims to define a standard for EMS and pre-hospital care. The objective is to develop and maintain a uniform EMS dataset and ensure portability of that data, far beyond what is possible with Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data. NEMSIS uses more than 400 data elements that are available to local EMS agencies to capture information about responses. As the result of contributions from four states, NEMSIS will contain about one million records—each representing one emergency response call—by the end of 2007. Gainor expects six additional states to be contributing data in the next month, and, within a few years, NEMSIS will be “a true national system.” Gainor, who earned a bachelor of science in emergency health services administration and a master’s degree in public administration, has served as the bureau chief of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) for the State of Idaho for 15 years and is a past president of the National Association of State Emergency Medical Services Officials. She has been involved in activities of national significance to EMS, including the formation of the Public Safety Advisory Group and the U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration EMS Scope of Practice Model. A leader among her EMS colleagues, Gainor is well known for her advocacy for EMS quality improvement and rural transportation issues. Last month, ITS America’s Public Safety Advisory Group elected Gainor its chair for 2008 through 2010. Related resources:
CERS welcomes safety and design researcher Keith Knapp
Keith Knapp The Center for Excellence in Rural Safety welcomes Keith Knapp as a new University of Minnesota researcher with the State and Local Policy Program at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He begins his work in January 2008. Knapp has nearly 18 years of transportation consulting, research, and training/teaching experience in design, safety, and operations. He was an associate research scientist at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. He is also the director of the Deer Vehicle Crash Information and Research Center, which is likely to follow Knapp to CERS. This pooled-fund project collects, summarizes, and shares data and information about deer-vehicle crashes and funds research on deer-vehicle countermeasures. The Center is funded by eight states, including Minnesota, and the FHWA to support safer roads. Knapp’s educational and research background gives him a combination of practical application and many years of safety-related research. In previous positions, he advised agency representatives in many safety and operation projects. As part of the University of Wisconsin Engineering Professional Development His research as principal investigator or key researcher in more than 16 studies focused on the safety and operational impacts of intersection and roadway designs, including geometrics, signage, marking, and weather. His research subjects include intersection safety, four-lane undivided to three-lane conversions, winter weather impacts, speed humps, and deer-vehicle crashes. Knapp also acted as the traffic and safety program manager at the Iowa State University Center for Transportation Research and Education (CTRE) in the late 1990s. Knapp is a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Operational Effects of Geometrics committee, the TRB Ecology and Transportation committee, and a TRB intersection joint subcommittee. Related resources: More rural safety news and resourcesPublic Information and Education in the Promotion of Highway Safety TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program (2007) 2007 Minnesota Toward Zero Deaths Conference proceedings Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota (2007) |
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