Road Safety Audits
A Road Safety Audit (RSA) is the formal safety performance examination of an existing or future road or intersection by an independent, multidisciplinary team. It qualitatively estimates and reports on potential road safety issues and identifies opportunities for improvements in safety for all road users. The FHWA works with State and local jurisdictions and Tribal Governments to integrate RSAs into the project development process for new roads and intersections, and also encourages RSAs on existing roads and intersections.
The aim of an RSA is to answer the following questions:
- What elements of the road may present a safety concern: to what extent, to which road users, and under what circumstances?
- What opportunities exist to eliminate or mitigate identified safety concerns?
Public agencies with a desire to improve the overall safety performance of roadways under their jurisdiction should be excited about the concept of RSAs. Road safety audits can be used in any phase of project development from planning and preliminary engineering, design and construction. RSAs can also be used on any sized project from minor intersection and roadway retrofits to mega-projects.
i dont know what its like in Texas.....but i have noticed in this State....if there is a safety concern with an intersection or a road,and people have voiced their concerns.....usually it takes a death or two before something is done about it.....
Harry, I lived for 35 years in the Equality State. That would be Wyoming, where the plains meet the mountains, which as I understand it is the Native American interpretation of the name, "Wyoming." You can hardly drive 20 miles without an incline or a decline in elevation which also exists at mile-high altitudes through much of the state.
Here's my unappreciated perspective amongst the lions of the law around here, (and I don't blame anyone for being true to his discipline as he or she knows it):
The reason I slept well last night is because when I worked for Wes Peterson in the Equality State all those years ago, nothing in his personality ever challenged other people very much: he was a quiet, polite, good family man who at first superficial thought, may have made few waves in life. He did, however do one thing with a discipline--Wes took pictures of dead people by the roadside in fatal highway accidents, although he was a full professional civil engineer whose specialty was ascertaining that the highway department was not the cause of highway fatalities, and his specialty wasn't photography, most likely.
One day, I was filing when Mr. Peterson was sitting nearby, and I ran into his macabre pictorial file. He even said I probably would be better off if I didn't have to look at all 179 of them. I had already seen a handful of them, and he was right. They were sickening. But nobody, not even a friend could make me forget what I saw. I am an artist of sorts, and visual images have an impact upon me that I simply cannot forget; the pathetic sight of people laying dead in contorted positions because something went wrong on the road never left me.
I also thought of years of driving through that mountainous state, and I know for a fact that after Interstate 25 was built while I lived there, traffic fatalities as well as car troubles that caused them were seriously reduced between Cheyenne and Casper Wyoming. You could drive between the two cities in any given weather, and in spite of ascending and descending slopes, little pressure was put on your brakes if any after the new road went in.
Also, the city of Chugwater, Wyoming is now located on a 4-mile arc that gently slopes up and down that also have no wear and tear on the brakes of cars and trucks. Unfortunately, the winds do blow harshly in January and February, and the highway department regularly has to close the road down anyway to clear off the mega trucks, which can take up to 4 hours apiece on roads of sheer ice and dangerous high winds. It is not unknown for the roads to be closed for up to a week in times of inclement snow and frozen ice conditions in the middle of the winter.
I'm glad I got to post on this thread last night, Harry. It made me think retrospectively back to the 35 years I had the privilege of living in a low population state that printed a state highway department safety manual entitled "Driver Instruction manual for the state of Wyoming" that started out with late Governor Hathaway's wonderful words, "Every child is a human caution sign" in or around 1969 when I barely passed my first driver's test in the state after glancing through the manual that was used to draw from in creating the state driving test. At first, I thought my dismal performance on the test was on account of trick questions (it had to be in my young, arrogant mind). Now, I know better.
The highway safety engineers in that state are required to have professional licenses to practice as professional engineers, and the laws are specific that if a professional engineer recommends a certain construction behavior that saves a human life on the roads, the construction boss and his crew will make it happen. That can be when the Wyoming Highway Department Managers, who also ruled the roost over Wyoming Safety Patrol Officers, yet listened to their words with regard to highway fatalities. The officers job descriptions included having to wait until the safety engineer arrives to take his macabre photographs of the accident to analyze whether this or that death occurred by bad highway construction methods.
Not every state regards human lives as important enough reasons to cut through a rock and whittle it down 300 feet to reduce the grade of the road to a level that will not cause the needless snuffing out of a human being whose automobile brakes broke as a consequence of constant driving over roads designed around ignoring the loss of human life and suffering that they could cause.
It's a decision every state has to make for itself--how to align decision-making power for public safety, how much grade to allow for the public to traverse, and whether spending a couple of extra million dollars cutting through hard rock or creating a 4-mile circle around a mountainous town upon which to build a 4-lane highway with double-wide shoulders is the preferred route for people in that state.
Apparently, the professional engineers in Wyoming were as sickened as I was by those photographs of dead people and made the executive decision not to do roads that would result in the necessity for keeping such a macabre file on cases in which the safety issues were so egregious they had a hand in creating the tragedy.
Apparently this is not an acceptable perspective in other states in which the onus is entirely upon the drivers of the cars that go spinning out of control on the state's demonically-acceptable grade elevations that cause brakes to fail and other automobile anomalies that do not occur on properly-engineered roads. I prefer the motive of road construction that is based on the principle that every child in that state is a human caution sign that depends on conscientious adults for his well-being.
My feelings revolve around photographs of dead people whose lives were cut short by someone's failure to plan a safe road situation. Such feelings are surely irrelevant in a state that does not have the words "every child is a human caution sign" written into the motto of the state's driving manual and upon the hearts of the people who live in that state.
States' rights mean you have to live with the state's preference of throwing the book at whomever they deem is MOST responsible for the death. In my mind, that would be who committed malfeasance of building a safe road. In their mind, it is the victim of what their bad roads did to his truck who received the onus of their book-throwing in a state court of law. It's a state's right to do stupid, and California did.
