The Roadway Departure Safety Goal

Over the past several years, STATE has had continued reductions in roadway departure fatalities as indicated in Table 1.

Table 1: State Roadway Departure Fatalities

	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	Total
Number of Roadway Departure Fatalities	547	596	538	496	469	2,646

The roadway departure goal is to reduce the XXX roadway departure fatalities that occurred in XXXX by XX percent by XXXX, or to prevent approximately XX additional roadway departure deaths from occurring annually.

The Approach

The HSIP program has been based upon a traditional approach directed towards improving roadway safety at specific high-crash locations by identifying and analyzing individual crashes at the locations, defining crash patterns, determining appropriate countermeasures to reduce future crash potential, and then implementing those countermeasures. While this is an important approach and needs to continue, it has limited impact in terms of reducing statewide numbers of roadway departure fatalities.

To help lower statewide roadway departure fatalities, two additional approaches are recommended to complement the traditional approach:

• Systematic application of large numbers of cost-effective, low-cost countermeasures at locations that have specific, moderate crash types above a specified crash frequency level.
• Comprehensive application of low-cost infrastructure improvements coupled with targeted education and enforcement initiatives on corridors and in municipalities that exhibit a very high severe roadway departure crash history.

In the systematic approach, the first step is to identify low-cost countermeasures. Then the crash data system is searched to identify highway sections that have targeted crashes at or above a crash threshold that would ensure cost-effective deployment of these countermeasures. Estimates of the impacts of the deployments can be made in terms of projected statewide roadway departure crashes prevented, annual lives saved, and overall deployment costs.

The comprehensive approach combines sets of cost-effective, low-cost infrastructure countermeasures with a coordinated set of education and highly visible enforcement initiatives targeted to reduce severe roadway departure crashes on corridors and within municipalities that have a severe roadway departure crash history.

Three other features need to be added to the plan to better improve the ability to achieve the safety improvement goal:

1. The safety program should be expanded to incorporate low-cost, cost-effective countermeasures on other types of projects such as resurfacing and surface transportation projects – especially if a crash history exists within the area of the work and the countermeasure can reduce future crash potential.
2. The safety program should include cost-effective treatments on local roads since a portion of the statewide roadway departure crash problem occurs on local roads.
3. Additional countermeasures rarely or never used in STATE need to be carefully and judiciously deployed on highway sections that have specific crash problems that these countermeasures can address. The countermeasure should be evaluated to determine if more widespread use is appropriate.

Distribution of the State Roadway Departure Fatality Problem

The roadway departure crash and fatality data for STATE was analyzed to gain insight on the distribution and characteristics of the roadway departure crash problem. Key information derived from the roadway departure data analysis is shown in Tables 2-5.

Table 3: Summary of Roadway Departure Fatalities, Crashes, and Fatalities per 100 Crashes – 2004-2008

Locality	State Rural	State Urban	Local
All RD Crashes
Fatalities	1,881	358	402
Crashes	75,281	31,708	43,661
Fat/100 Crashes	2.49	1.13	0.92
Interstate RD Crashes
Fatalities	117	75	-
Crashes	6,296	8,973	-
Fat/100 Crashes	1.86	0.84	-
State Route Type RD Crashes
Fatalities	1,318	168	-
Crashes	52,288	14,411	-
Fat/100 Crashes	2.52	1.12	-
US Route Type RD Crashes
Fatalities	429	100	-
Crashes	14,350	7,372	-
Fat/100 Crashes	2.99	1.36	-
Other Route Type RD State Crashes
Fatalities	22	15	-
Crashes	2,347	952	-
Fat/100 Crashes	0.93	1.57	-

Summary of Roadway Departure Crash Concerns

• Crashes predominantly occur in rural areas; severity of crashes is greater in rural areas than urban areas.
• Approximately 25 percent of the fatalities involve head-on or opposing-flow sideswipe crashes.
• Driving violations (speeding, alcohol, and unbelted driving) are major factors in roadway departure crashes. Many of these crashes involve multiple driving violation factors.

Summary of Roadway Departure Countermeasure Deployments

A summary of the countermeasures, deployment levels, costs, and estimated lives saved provided in Table 6.