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.

CERS publishes second rural safety research summary about Minnesota counties

Approximately 56 percent of the roadway crash fatalities in the United States occur along rural roadways, but only 23 percent of the population resides within areas defined as rural. Almost 70 percent of the crash fatalities in Minnesota are in rural areas.

A second research summary in the CERS Improving Rural Transportation Safety series summarizes the characteristics of the fatal rural roadway crashes within five Minnesota counties and describes some of the safety improvement programs or campaigns being used in this five-county area. Past research has shown that some of the typical characteristics of fatal rural roadway crashes include younger drivers, alcohol involvement, lack of seat belt use, and speeding.

In addition, the report, titled Five-County Minnesota Case Study: Rural Roadway Fatal Crash Characteristics and Select Safety Improvement Programs, by CERS director Lee Munnich and research assistant Tyler Patterson, proposes several recommendations that focus on improving rural roadway safety data and analyses. Evaluations of safety improvement programs/campaigns are also proposed.

The Five-County Minnesota Case Study report was published this month and is available for download from the CERS Web site. Print copies will also be available. In February, the Center published the first research summary Rural Transportation Safety and the Strategic Highway Safety Plan: An Examination of Select State Programs and Practices, also by CERS director Lee Munnich and research assistant Alec More.

Related resources:

• Five-County Minnesota Case Study: Rural Roadway Fatal Crash Characteristics and Select Safety Improvement Programs
• Rural Transportation Safety and the Strategic Highway Safety Plan: An Examination of Select State Programs and Practices
• CERS and affiliated research projects

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CERS launches new partnership with Isanti County TZD

A new partnership between the Center for Excellence in Rural Safety (CERS) and the Isanti County Toward Zero Deaths (TZD) was launched October 18 at a town hall meeting in Cambridge, Minnesota. The meeting focused on CERS and TZD strategies for reducing traffic fatalities and serious injuries.

U.S. Rep. James Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, along with Isanti County Judge James Dehn and Isanti County TZD chair Bob Bollenbeck, joined CERS director Lee Munnich, Robert Johns, CTS director and CERS director of training and outreach, and Tom Horan, CERS research director, at the event.

Bollenbeck and Dehn gave an overview of their TZD program as well as discussed Isanti County innovative strategies for reducing deaths on rural roads. Oberstar provided perspectives on rural safety and the new partnership as well as on the upcoming surface transportation bill. Horan introduced SafeRoadMaps.org, a new interactive Web-based tool developed by CERS to help create safer roads and save lives.

The new partnership with Isanti County TZD is exploring ways to use Safe Road Maps to support the safety efforts of a rural county. CERS launched SafeRoadMaps.org in August to provide citizens, policymakers, and practitioners a visual way to understand the problem of traffic fatalities in rural areas. Within the first two days, the Web site, which uses Google Earth technology to see where traffic deaths occur, tallied more than 3 million hits.

Isanti County TZD has undertaken a set of innovative strategies to reduce deaths on rural roads. Judge James Dehn, at the center of those efforts, has tackled the problem of drunk driving with such approaches as DUI tracking, staggered sentencing for repeat offenders, bar/community partnerships, and safe cabs. These strategies will be a primary focus of the new partnership.

CERS conducts several focused research activities to explore policy, behavior, and technology approaches, such as projects addressing safety-conscious planning, ITS and rural emergency response, integrated policy approaches, and related human factors, societal trends, and stakeholder needs analysis.

Related resources:

• Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs Regionalities Blog article
• Isanti County News article
• Isanti-Chisago County Star article
• SafeRoadMaps.org
• Minnesota Toward Zero Deaths (TZD)
• Isanti County, Minnesota

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Profiles in Safety: Lessons from Maine on passing a primary seat belt law

One little paragraph. It’s all Maine Bureau of Highway Safety director Lauren Stewart has to show for years of work. It may not seem like much, but Stewart knows the few sentences composing Maine’s successful primary seat belt legislation will save lives. Seat belts reduce the risk of fatal injury in a vehicle crash by 45 percent, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

Primary seat belt laws give law enforcement officers the power to pull over drivers and ticket them for not wearing a seat belt. In states with secondary seat belt laws, officers must pull over drivers for another offense to cite them for a seat belt law violation.

Currently, 26 states have primary seat belt laws. NTSB statistics show these states have a 10- to 15-percent higher rate of seat belt use than states with secondary enforcement. Because of a proven ability to increase seat belt usage, primary seat belt laws are recommended by virtually every transportation safety organization.

In rural areas, primary seat belt laws are especially effective. CERS research demonstrates states with stronger seat belt laws have a smaller proportion of rural road fatalities. Rural drivers are also the least likely to wear a seat belt, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Only 79 percent of rural vehicle occupants wore seat belts in 2008, compared with 84 percent in urban areas. And, a 2006 study found more than half of all motorists killed in rural road crashes were not wearing seat belts.

For many years, highway safety advocates in Maine struggled to pass a primary seat belt law. “We’ve all heard the old saying, if you don’t succeed, try, try again,” says Stewart. “That’s really the story of our history with seat belt challenges in Maine.”

However, in September 2007, Stewart and her team finally made Maine’s primary seat belt law a reality. Designating a non-state agency—the American Automobile Association (AAA)—to take the lead on the legislation contributed its success. AAA’s efforts included activating their members, establishing a Web-based information center and engaging in dialogue with legislators.

Targeting the media helped build public support for the seat belt legislation. Stewart arranged meetings with editorial boards of the state’s largest newspapers. She also distributed fact sheets to local police chiefs and county sheriffs -- helping them educate media outlets in their areas. Throughout the outreach effort, safety advocates focused on the message “seat belts save lives," steering the discussion away from using seat belt legislation as a way to increase state revenue.

Stewart’s team had other important factors on their side. Having a strong plan in place to educate legislators with phone calls, meetings and powerful testimony from emergency responders helped gain votes. The legislation also benefited from the favorable political climate in Maine. Finally, simplified bill language earned support for the law. In the end, the one small paragraph that makes up the bill's final language is a major step towards saving lives on Maine’s highways.

Related Resources:

• Lauren Stewart’s presentation on primary seat belt laws (440 KB PDF)
• Maine Bureau of Highway Safety
• NTSB Primary Seat Belt Legislation Resources and Information
• Governors Highway Safety Association Seat Belt Law Resources
  

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Traffic and Safety Engineer's Corner: Two useful crash-reduction documents

by Keith Knapp, CERS Director of Transportation Safety Engineering

In July, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) associate administrator for safety released an action memorandum titled Consideration and Implementation of Proven Safety Countermeasures. It included a discussion of a wide range of “processes, infrastructure design techniques, and highway features” that are believed to be effective. The memorandum included descriptions of nine countermeasures, application guidance about when and where they should be applied, information about their effectiveness, and a series of related reference documents and FHWA technical contacts.

This information was included on one-page information guidance sheets for the following countermeasures:

• Road Safety Audits
• Rumble Strips and Rumble Stripes
• Median Barriers
• Safety Edge
• Roundabouts
• Left and Right Turn Lanes at Stop-Controlled Intersections
• Yellow Change Intervals
• Medians and Pedestrian Refuge Areas in Urban and Suburban Areas
• Walkways

The majority of these countermeasures are applicable in both rural and urban areas. These are the countermeasures the FHWA Office of Safety believes can be used to help achieve the safety goals set for the United States, individual states, locally, and regionally. This memorandum and its information can be found on the FHWA Office of Safety Web site (see link below).

Another useful document that includes some good information related to what we know about the crash reduction impacts of a large number of countermeasures is the FHWA Desktop Reference for Crash Reduction Factors. This document contains approximately 100 pages of crash reduction factor information related to intersection, roadway departure, and pedestrian crashes. The crash, site, and study characteristics for each crash reduction factor are provided if available. This includes crash type, area type, crash severity, intersection configuration and control, traffic volumes, number of study observations, study type, and document reference. The standard error (if available) of the crash reduction factors is also provided. The general objective of the FHWA was to provide a document where a wide range of crash reduction factors could be found.

Related Resources:

• Consideration and Implementation of Proven Safety Countermeasures
• Desktop Reference for Crash Reduction Factors
• FHWA Office of Safety

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A new approach to rural intersection safety

The University of Minnesota’s Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Institute is working to reduce highway crashes by using advanced traffic monitoring technologies that will help drivers safely navigate rural intersections where there are no traffic lights. In the near future, a new safety system will be field-tested at a selected rural crossroad. Researchers believe the equipment will reduce crashes without disrupting traffic flow by helping drivers safely judge gaps in traffic.

Although intersections make up only a small part of the U.S. highway network, intersection crashes comprise more than 40 percent of all vehicle crashes nationwide. In rural Minnesota, crash records show that approximately one-third of all crashes occur at intersections—and researchers have found that failure to select a safe gap in traffic is a factor in more than three-quarters of these incidents. Twenty percent of all fatal crashes in Minnesota occur at rural unsignalized intersections.

Traditionally, installing a traffic signal has been seen as the best available approach to reduce crashes at locations where a high-speed, high-capacity rural expressway intersects a low-speed, low-volume rural road. However, it is well-known that adding a traffic signal to rural highway intersections often brings a new set of safety problems, including increased rates of rear-end vehicle collisions. Traffic signals on rural expressways also disrupt the flow of traffic and may needlessly waste fuel while increasing air pollution.

In 2002, the ITS Institute began an ambitious research project aimed at developing infrastructure-based technologies capable of reducing driver error at unsignalized rural highway intersections. The main idea behind Intersection Decision Support was to help drivers select a safe gap in traffic—a more effective way to improve safety than regulating traffic flows. The project’s goal was to create a system that is widely deployable and comparable in cost to traffic signal installation.

Researchers from the Institute’s Intelligent Vehicles Lab designed a sensor network, incorporating multiple radar units mounted along the high-speed expressway, to track approaching vehicles and determine whether gaps between them are sufficient for a stopped vehicle to safely enter or cross the highway. A methodology was also developed to identify candidate intersections for the technology.

This sensor system, installed at a rural intersection in southern Minnesota, was used to collect data to help researchers better understand driver gap decision-making behavior and the different ways in which drivers negotiate highway intersections. The instruments and cameras have also captured several crashes, providing valuable insights into the causes of highway intersection collisions. This information was then used to develop an effective driver-interface design.

The Intersection Decision Support concept attracted the interest of several state Departments of Transportation, who joined with Minnesota in a pooled-fund effort. The Minnesota Mobile Intersection Surveillance System was deployed at through-stop intersections with serious crash histories in Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and California in order to evaluate whether regional differences would affect the design.

In 2007, the Minnesota Department of Transportation and the ITS Institute were selected by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to participate in the Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance Systems (CICAS) research initiative. CICAS brings together federal agencies, automobile manufacturers, and university transportation centers with the goal of developing new technologies to prevent intersection collisions that kill thousands of Americans and injure more than one million more every year. Minnesota’s Stop Sign Assist research focused on rural unsignalized intersection crashes.

In August 2008, the USDOT announced that the Wisconsin DOT together with the ITS Institute will receive an award from the Rural Safety Initiative Program to deploy and evaluate the Intersection Decision Support technology at a northern Wisconsin intersection.

This article was adapted from the October 2008 issue of UTC Spotlight, produced by the University Transportation Centers Program at the USDOT’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration.

Related resources:

• Read the complete UTC Spotlight article (212 KB PDF)
• ITS Institute Rural Unsignalized Intersections research
• FHWA Rural Intersection Decision Support pooled-fund study
• USDOT Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance Systems (CICAS)

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More rural safety news and resources

Rural Highway Safety Clearinghouse: Selected recent additions

• Traffic Safety Facts: Increasing Seat Belt Use in Rural Areas of the Great Lakes Region (544 KB PDF)
  National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2007)
• A Guide to Traffic Control of Rural Roads in an Agricultural Emergency
  Transportation Research Board (2008)
• Driving Down Lane-Departure Crashes: A National Priority (3.4 MB PDF)
  American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (2008)
• Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Pavement Rumble Strips (680 KB PDF)
  Kentucky Transportation Center (2008)
• Transportation Statistics Annual Report 2007
  U.S. Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics (2007)
• State Transportation Statistics 2007
  U.S. Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics (2007)
• Traffic Safety Facts: States With Primary Enforcement Laws Have Lower Fatality Rates (612 KB PDF)
  National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2008)
• Making the Case for Transportation Safety – Ideas for Decision Makers (1.4 MB PDF)
  Federal Highway Administration (2008)
• Effectiveness of Behavioral Highway Safety Countermeasures
  Transportation Research Board (2008)
• Toolbox of Countermeasures and Their Potential Effectiveness for Roadway Departure Crashes (608 KB PDF)
  Federal Highway Administration (2007)