U.S. Department of Transportation
Federal Highway Administration
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20590
202-366-4000
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The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Office of Safety created a Toolkit for Rural Local and Tribal Roadway Safety Practitioners (referred to hereafter as the Toolkit) to provide a step-by-step process to assist local agency and Tribal practitioners in completing traffic safety analyses. Figure 1 shows the safety process outlined in the Toolkit. The Toolkit includes an explanation of each step in the process and provides tools, examples, guidance, and resources for learning more about each step. The process and tools presented in the Toolkit are flexible and can be applied to assist in solving any number of safety situations.
The Toolkit has been developed to provide information about how to study road safety on rural roads under the jurisdiction of local or Tribal agencies. There are many different types of staff that could be responsible for safety on local and Tribal roads, including maintenance staff, landscapers, planners, engineers, or politicians. Throughout the Toolkit and User Guides, these people are referred to as “practitioners” or “staff,” independent of whether they work for a local or Tribal road agency. Similarly, the road agency is referred to as the “agency” or “jurisdiction,” whether it is a Tribal or local agency.
The FHWA has developed two User Guides (this document and its counterpart) to provide practitioners with examples of applying the tools presented in the Toolkit. Each User Guide presents an example scenario that is typical on rural roads and example solutions to the scenario using methods presented in the Toolkit.
The User Guides’ example scenarios show intended use and application of the tools for each toolkit process step. The User Guides’ example solutions provide step-by-step procedures for practitioners to apply the methods to comparable situations in any community.
There are two User Guides:
This is User Guide #1 – Site Safety Analysis. The example that follows demonstrates how to study conditions at a preselected site. In this hypothetical example, the study site has been identified from community concerns; however, the methods are applicable to any situation where one preselected site is under investigation.
Referring again to Figure 1, User Guide #1 provides example applications of:
Steps 2 and 3 in this User Guide have already been completed because the site of interest was selected because of a public concern; not from a data-driven process.
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