HSIP in Action: Enhancing Transportation Safety

“Safety is Urgent!”

I heard this phrase for the first time from one of my favorite clients. It took me a while to understand how strongly he meant it though, and how he and his colleagues built their state’s transportation safety program to show their intent.

Recently, I managed a statewide Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) on-call services contract for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC). The HSIP is one of the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) core federal-aid funding programs that allocates dedicated safety funds to states to address roadway safety challenges, with a focus on preventing fatalities and serious injuries. In Kentucky, $50M to $60M is the annual amount of HSIP funding invested through the course of the current federal transportation authorization known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).

KYTC wanted to create a more integrated approach to transportation safety, so they set a goal to bring more focus and systematic methodology to tackle roadway hazards across the state’s road network. They also wanted to foster collaboration with local entities to ensure targeted interventions with measurable impacts.

Safety Engineering’s Basic Steps

1) Understand where serious crashes happen the most, especially in amounts that exceed what would typically be predicted for the type of roadway facility in question.

2) Analyze the likely causes, or risk factors, of those crashes.

3) Determine what kind of solutions, or “countermeasures,” are available to decrease the risk for crashes, especially severe crashes.

4) Determine which of those solutions has the best return on investment or benefit–costs ratio.

The costs, or investments, are those associated with the project, program, or policy that is being proposed. The benefits are the quantified value of lives saved or injuries prevented.

Crash Modification Factors (CMFs)

Another important aspect of safety is what are called Crash Modification Factors (CMFs), which are based on extensive research and made available via a website called the CMF Clearinghouse, which is managed by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) and University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center. CMFs reflect what percentage of reduction in crashes can be expected if a particular countermeasure is applied to a piece of infrastructure. For example, if transverse bar pavement markings are put on an approach to a roundabout, the CMF is 0.43, thus the crashes would be expected to be reduced by 57%. These evidence-based factors add a great deal of confidence when a countermeasure is chosen and funds are used to implement them.

How Can You Improve Safety Faster? 

But if projects can be implemented more quickly, and by implication, save more lives sooner, why wouldn’t we do that? KYTC asked themselves that same question a few years ago and it led them to alter their organization to do more — and faster. The emergence of USDOT’s Safe System Approach also reinforced their resolve to improve transportation safety more quickly.

This introspective questioning guided KYTC to allow their HSIP to seek out more critical projects statewide, then work with their districts and local government officials to examine these safety issues more closely, develop alternatives, and test their return on investment, but also to design the projects and put them out for bid — all within the same KYTC branch! My client would say “Kentucky’s safety program operates like a DOT within a DOT” because he could deliver a project from concept to construction. Organizationally, DOTs are usually broken up by type of work and geography, which tends to slow processes down. Not so with HSIP at KYTC! And the partnership between the HSIP branch and the entity with whom they are working is very strong and interactive — and evolving all the time.

Another effect of this centralized, streamlined approach to HSIP is the group’s ability to keep track of all the projects they have funded and facilitated, getting feedback from districts on each project’s effectiveness, but also deepening their own knowledge on the best ways to approach each type of safety project — the KYTC HSIP Branch essentially became a learning organization and has gradually become a model that other agencies are coming to for advice. The goal is simple, to save lives and prevent serious injuries. This is why I really get professional satisfaction from safety engineering.

How to Make Your Program Effective

For any agency who is increasing its attention to transportation safety, there are some very fundamental things that can be done to help your program be effective:

• Have an ‘investment plan.’ Let the data tell you how best to prioritize funding for the maximum positive impact. Revisit the plan regularly as more is learned.
• Build processes to evaluate safety solutions that are accurate enough to make a good decision, but not so disjointed or exacting that they take a long time.
• Consciously build your expertise in safety, refining the methods as more is learned. The methods are very repeatable, allowing you to apply them more quickly each time.
• Keep scanning the industry for ideas; they seem to be emerging at an ever-faster pace as more engineers – in many countries – learn and share their results.

Be safe out there!