The midyear meeting of the Transportation Research Board’s Roadside Safety Design Committee was held in Irvine, California, in conjunction with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Technical Committee on Roadside Safety from July 29 through August 2, 2012. The Committee met for approximately 3 days to discuss research needs regarding roadside departure crashes in support of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Decade of Action initiative. This e-circular contains authored summaries of the presentations and breakout discussions from the workshop. WHO launched the Decade of Action (2011—2020) to reduce the number of serious injury and fatal crashes. In response to this call for action, many agencies are adopting a vision of Toward Zero Deaths and AASHTO has adopted the goal of reducing fatalities in half by 2030 (to less than 20,000 fatalities per year). Roadway departure crashes are responsible for more than half of the fatalities on U.S. roads and are a major contributor to fatalities around the world. The TRB Roadside Safety Design Committee and the AASHTO Technical Committee on Roadside Safety are committed to contribute toward meeting and exceeding the AASHTO goals. With the recent revision and publication of the AASHTO Roadside Design Guide and Manual for the Assessment of Safety Hardware, this is an appropriate time to look forward to identify goals and research needs that will lead to the next revision of these documents. This workshop focuses on the activities that are needed in the next 10 years to provide this direction. (Author/publisher)
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