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 two-thirds of the state’s travel, in vehicle-miles, takes place on rural roads that interconnect small communities and join the rural geography to interstates, principal state corridors, and urban centers (NDDOT). This level of rural driving is relatively high, considering only about a third of the nation’s travel occurs on rural roads (U.S. DOT). From a safety perspective, this poses an inherent challenge because the risk for serious injury and death on rural roads is relatively high compared to the risk on urban roads (U.S. DOT 2005, U.S. DOT 2009a). In North Dakota, crash reports from 2009 to 2013 show that nearly 83% of fatal crashes and 85% of serious injury crashes — which include fatal and disabling injuries — occurred on non-interstate rural roads (NDDOT 2013). 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 seat belt use on non-interstate rural roads. Understanding tendencies and trends in seat belt use on these rural roads is essential to making wise decisions with regard to efforts to encourage seat belt use in the state. The U.S. Department of Transportation does work with states to measure seat belt use through the long-standing annual National Occupant Protection Use Survey (NOPUS). Results from this survey supplement to NOPUS statewide estimate which also includes urban and interstate travel which are heavily weighted in the final seat belt use estimate. Figure 1.1 provides some insight into seat belt use based on occupant reports for crashes by road type. Although not a perfect reflection of use on the road types, trends do offer some insight for the larger occupant population. Other perspectives on the traffic crashes are offered in the seat belt use rates by occupant injury outcome and crash incidence trends. The crash incidence is categorized by the most serious injury outcome resulting from a crash event in order to provide additional context regarding traffic activity. The observation study described in this report of the larger occupant population is a continuation of efforts to measure seat belt usage for all occupants on rural roads North Dakota. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting