Abstract:
The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT), Federal Highway
Administration (FHWA) has identified 28 Proven Safety Countermeasures (PSCs) to
reduce fatal and serious injury crashes on roads in the United States. The PSCs are
proven to be effective through sound research and are designed to improve safety for all
users and all kinds of roads ‒ from rural to urban, from high-volume freeways to less
traveled two-lane roads, from signalized crossings to horizontal curves, and everything in
between. The PSCs can support agencies with implementation of the Safe System
Approach (SSA), which seeks to build and reinforce multiple layers of protection to both
prevent crashes from happening and minimize the harm caused to those involved when
crashes do occur. To assist agencies with implementation of the PSCs and SSA, FHWA
has developed several resources for measuring SSA alignment – the Safe System
Roadway Design Hierarchy, Safe System Project-based Alignment framework, and the
Safe System Policy-based Alignment framework. These tools characterize engineering
and infrastructure-based countermeasures and strategies relative to their alignment with
the SSA, and can be used to assess existing conditions and identify potential
improvements through a Safe System lens using quantitative (crash exposure, likelihood,
severity) and qualitative (safety prompts) evaluations of a location. Zero is our goal – a
Safe System is how we get there!
