TECHNICAL DETAILS FOR INTEGRATING SAFETY AND PLANNING AT THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL: A REGIONAL CASE STUDY

摘要

The need for strengthening the connection between transportation planning and safety has beenwell documented (1), and guides have been developed to encourage this integration (2,3). Whena central Virginia region expressed an interest in performing such integration, beginning with ananalysis of existing crashes, an opportunity arose to implement one such guide. This led to theidentification of key details that a transportation planning professional, with the goal ofintegrating safety and planning, must resolve. Details include the threshold distance defining acrash cluster, the manner in which disparate geographic systems are used to locate crashes,selection of performance measures to support community programs, and examination ofindividual crash reports to identify potential countermeasures. The commonality of these detailsis that they are not ends unto themselves but rather support larger objectives associated withsafety planning integration.This paper discusses resolution of these details, where the solution sought is notnecessarily optimal but one that minimizes computational effort, training needs, and staff time.Because regional planning agencies and state DOTs have limited staff and budgets available forthis endeavor, and because these details may not be apparent at the outset of a process to linksafety and planning, explicit consideration of these decisions may result in agencies performinganalyses that otherwise would not be undertaken. Further, it is possible to develop a relativelyshort training curriculum based on these concepts. Given that staff time is increasingly limited,providing just enough information to enable a single individual to perform a few what-ifscenarios is one way to increase incorporation of safety into the planning process elsewhere. Inthat sense, these findings suggest lessons for implementation of research results generally.