In 2006, the U.S. DOT reported 42,642 fatalities and nearly 3 million injuries resulting from highway crashes nationwide. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that highway crashes cost society more than $230 billion a year. To reduce injuries, fatalities, and other costs, billions of dollars are invested every year to engineer http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_622.pdfand construct improved and safer infrastructure, enforce traffic safety laws, and educate users of the nation’s highway system on safe practices. Each year, hundreds of millions of these dollars are spent on behavioral highway safety This report may be accessed by Internet users at countermeasures without sufficient knowledge of their benefits. The lack of sound information on the efficacy and costs of behavioral safety countermeasures such as public awareness campaigns, new safety program start-ups, and enforcement programs impedes effective decision making. With limited resources and the duty to ensure public accountability in the use of funds available for behavioral highway safety programs, there is a need to provide decision makers with additional information to determine the countermeasures that will result in the greatest reductions of crashes, injuries, and fatalities. Under NCHRP Project 17-33, “Effectiveness of Behavioral Highway Safety Countermeasures,” researchers at the Preusser Research Group, Inc., developed a framework and guidance for estimating the costs and benefits of emerging, experimental, untried, or unproven behavioral highway safety countermeasures. The researchers reviewed the behavioral countermeasures included in the report: Countermeasures that Work: A Highway Safety Countermeasure Guide for State Highway Offices. This report was prepared for the NHTSA by the Governors Highway Safety Association. The 104 countermeasures in the report were divided into four groups: proven to be effective, likely to be effective, unlikely to be effective or the effects are unknown, and known to have negative consequences. Effectiveness estimates were developed for a number of the proven to be effective countermeasures. The report includes a classification scheme to estimate the effectiveness of countermeasures that are believed “likely” to work but for which evaluation evidence is not yet available, as well as emerging and developing countermeasures that have not yet been fully implemented or evaluated. Guidelines are presented for estimating when countermeasures within each of these classifications are likely to be cost effective. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting