Summary

This project intends to supplement activities being conducted by the Traffic Safety Center (TSC) for the Statewide Coalition on Traffic Safety (SCOTS) through attendance and participation (in the form of advising the development of working groups to develop strategies) at Strategic Highway Safety Plan (SHSP) meetings.

By first identifying stakeholders in the project and creating a database in publication-ready format, the TSC can then conduct an assessment of the SHSP stakeholders using electronic methods to distribute, collect, and synthesize survey responses. From these responses, critical survey areas will be identified for data analysis and goal setting. This will be accomplished in two phases:

The first phase of data analysis and goal setting will include the documentation of all traffic-safety databases relevant to California. This includes data on behaviors and risk factors, bicycle, driver, pedestrian, and vehicle crashes, methods of travel, medical information (i.e. hospital discharge summaries), observations, opinion surveys, roadways and travel destinations, etc.

The second phase of data analysis and goal setting will analyze selected data from these databases to identify critical highway safety problems and opportunities. Where relevant, data will be broken down on the basis of demographics, primary collision factors, and the like. This will be included in the main SHSP report, along with a table for the comparison of the absolute number of fatalities in each survey area.

From there, the SHSP committee and subgroups will be contacted and worked with to develop and prioritize strategies within each survey area, including the definition of specific performance goals. Strategies and countermeasures included will range from education to enforcement to engineering, with the intent of providing the SHSP committee with this information.

An analysis procedure will then be developed to evaluate the results and directly compare performance relative to costs and benefits. This will be done on an annual basis to ensure the accuracy of the data, the priority of the proposed improvements, and each of the improvements' effectiveness.

Related PATH Articles/Journals

(None Published)