Summary

The number of roadway departure fatalities and incapacitating injuries within STATE can measurably decline over the next several years, but it will take a number of new and special actions, increased roadway departure safety emphasis, and additional funding to realize this benefit. The existing approach of emphasizing moderate- to high-cost improvements at high-crash roadway departure sections must be complemented with the deployment of a large number of low-cost, effective countermeasures and the use of a coordinated 3-E comprehensive approach on high-crash corridors and in municipalities that have a high number of roadway departure fatalities.

Recapping, the countermeasures, deployment levels, costs, and estimated lives saved needed to achieve the roadway departure safety goal are shown in Table 6. While the level and direction of effort is well beyond that currently being pursued for roadway departure safety, the expected outcome – preventing over XXXX crashes, nearly XXX incapacitating injury crashes, and more than XX fatalities annually on STATE'S highways – is worth the investment.