Tribally-driven usage of Road Safety Audit to prevent motor vehicle crashes

Introduction: Small, rural governments are resource-challenged to fund safety studies to identify roadway issues and engineering interventions to improve safety for the traveling public.  A Road Safety Audit (RSA) is one of nine proven safety countermeasures endorsed by the Federal Highway Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation.  The Duckwater Shoshone Tribe, located in rural frontier Nevada, received technical assistance from the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) to assess the safety of roads within and adjacent to their Reservation. 

Methods: During both the daylight and nighttime hours, the RSA team drove roads within and adjacent to the Reservation to assess signage, pavement markings, road conditions, drainage conditions, lighting, and travel patterns of pedestrians, bicyclists, and animals.  To document the hazards, the RSA team took photos and logged issues by road location, and prioritized the recommendations.  For the RSA, crash rates were calculated combining state and Tribal data per 1 million vehicle miles traveled and compared to the 2010 NDOT rural road category.

Results: The RSA team found that all hazards could be improved on all roads.  There were significant lane departures on the adjacent NDOT road (n= 10). The total crash rate calculated for the RSA was higher than the 2010 NDOT category (2.83 and 0.98, respectively) and the fatal crash rate was also higher (0.71 and 0.04, respectively).

Conclusions: The Tribal RSA identified multiple road safety issues.  A Tribally led multi-disciplinary team is now able to work towards data-driven engineering, educational, and policy actions to prevent crashes.