North Dakota’s rural roads provide vital social and commercial links for a widely dispersed population. The safety of these roadways is paramount in managing traffic assets to enhance the state’s livability. Approximately 54% of the state’s travel, in vehicle-miles, takes place on rural roads that interconnect small communities and join the rural geography to interstate corridors and urban centers (FHWA 2008). This level of rural driving is relatively high considering only about 25% of the nation’s travel is attributed to rural roads (FHWA 2008). From a safety perspective, this poses an inherent challenge because the risk for serious injury and death on these roads is relatively high compared to their urban counterparts (U.S. DOT 2005, U.S. DOT 2009a). For North Dakota, the danger is even more pronounced, as fatal crash reports from 2007 to 2010 show that nearly 88% of serious injuries, including fatal and disabling injuries, occurred on rural roads (NDDOT 2011). With the understanding that seat belts are a relatively low-cost safety device, and are an easy primary protection for occupants in passenger vehicles, North Dakota has chosen to continue to measure rural roads seat belt use. The U.S. Department of Transportation works with states to measure seat belt use through the annual National Occupant Passenger Use Survey (NOPUS). However, NOPUS does not include observation sites on local rural roads —the location for 1 in every 3 fatal crashes during the past five years (NDDOT 2008). This study is a continuation of previous measurement of rural seat belt usage in North Dakota. (Author/publisher)
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