The Role of Well-Designed Transportation Projects Enhancing Communities: Traffic Safety Methodologies

Project summary:

This project was a component of the Study on the Role of Well-Designed Transportation Projects for Enhancing Communities. The objectives of this component were: 1) to review methods by which traffic safety is taken into account in designing exemplary transportation projects; and 2) to make recommendations as to how traffic safety considerations could be more completely integrated into the design process. The project was centered on the ideal was that safety issues should be an explicit and quantitative component of design decision-making, meaning that ideally, numerical predictions of the safety effects of different design alternatives should be part of how those alternatives are evaluated. Because a review of safety in all its aspects was beyond the scope of this project, the team focused on pedestrian safety and its relation to traffic-calming design elements. The project objectives were accomplished by first identifying, from the lists of cases developed by the other project teams, 4-6 cases where traffic safety issues appeared to be especially prominent. Impact assessment documents for the cases were then obtained and studied by the principal investigator to determine how, or if, assessments of traffic safety implications were included. It is recommended that measurement of safety effects be included as part of context-sensitive design projects, to expand the knowledge base on which a future prediction capability can be built.