Safety data provide the key to making sound decisions on the design and operation of roadways, but deficiencies in many States’ safety databases do not allow for good decisionmaking. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) sponsored a scanning study of how agencies in the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia develop and use traffic safety information systems. That scan produced a report that included recommendations for advancing safety themes in the areas of strategy, efficiency, and utility. This current report is the result of a follow-on effort to build on the scan team’s final report and draft implementation plan by reviewing in detail the strategies suggested, providing action-related details to some of the critical strategies, and adding new strategies to help reach the team’s goals. Although strategies related to both crash data and other safety data such as roadway inventory and traffic volumes are included in this paper, more emphasis is placed on the latter because more effort has traditionally been spent on improving crash data. The five critical strategies detailed here include: (1) increase support for both safety programs and safety information systems from top-level administrators in State and local transportation agencies; (2) improve safety data by defining good inventory data and institutionalizing continual improvement toward established performance measures; (3) improve safety data by making it easier to collect, store, and use; (4) improve safety data by increasing the use of critical safety analysis tools, which themselves require good data; and (5) improve and protect safety data by storage and linkage with critical nonsafety data. Discussion and action items are presented for each strategy, along with recommendations concerning which government agency potentially could be responsible for implementing the recommendation and a priority ranking of the proposed recommendations based on input from a review panel. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting