Technical Details for Integrating Safety and Planning at Level of Individual: Regional Case Study

The need for strengthening the connection between transportation safety and planning has been well documented, and guides have been developed to encourage this integration. When a central Virginia region expressed an interest in performing such integration, beginning with an analysis of existing crashes, an opportunity arose to implement one such guide. This opportunity led to the identification of key details that a transportation planning professional, with the goal of integrating safety and planning, must resolve. Details include the threshold distance that defines a crash cluster, the manner in which disparate geographic systems are used to locate crashes, selection of performance measures to support community programs, and examination of individual crash reports to identify potential countermeasures. The commonality of these details is that they are not ends unto themselves but rather that they support larger objectives associated with integration of safety planning. This paper discusses resolution of such details through a search for a solution that is not necessarily optimal but minimizes computational effort, training needs, and staff time. Because regional planning agencies and state departments of transportation have limited staff and budgets available for this endeavor and because these details may not be apparent at the outset of a process to link safety and planning, explicit consideration of these decisions may result in agencies performing analyses that otherwise would not be undertaken. Furthermore, it is possible to develop a relatively short training curriculum that is based on these concepts. Given that staff time is increasingly limited, providing just enough information to enable an individual to perform a few what-if scenarios is one way to increase incorporation of safety into the planning process elsewhere. In that sense, these findings suggest lessons for implementation of research results generally.