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The evolving landscape of climate conditions leads to more frequent and intense natural hazard events, affecting low-volume roads on federal lands. Despite the existence of known maintenance solutions to reduce these impacts, the limited funding availability hinders the implementation of these solutions at scale. This funding limitation is compounded by the absence of necessary data […]
The Systemic Safety User Guide is an update to the Federal Highway Administration’s Systemic Safety Project Selection Tool. The Guide presents a process for incorporating systemic planning into the safety management process. The chapters describe how agencies can identify focus crash types, facility types, and risk factors; screen and prioritize candidate locations using risk; identify […]
This report reviews and assesses driver monitoring systems (DMS) and related technologies for alcoholimpairment detection and SAE International Level 2 partial driving automation systems. For the review oftechnologies to identify driver alcohol impairment, 331 technologies were reviewed. The systems were classifiedas physiology-based, tissue spectroscopy-based, camera-based, vehicle kinematics-based, hybrid, and patent-stage systems. A key focus was […]
Use of DOT-compliant motorcycle helmets was 73.8 percent1 in 2023, not statistically different at the 0.05 level from 66.5 percent in 2022. The 2023 estimate is the highest ever recorded. This result is from the National Occupant Protection Use Survey (NOPUS), the only survey that provides nationwide, probability-based, observed data on motorcycle helmet use in […]
This report documents the effort by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Office of Safety and Operations Research & Development and the FHWA Office of Operations to assess current data sources, to compile existing data, to review gaps, and to propose a data collection strategy that will start to quantify the occurrence of responder struck-by crashes. […]
Traffic fatalities in the United States decreased by 1.7 percent from 2021 to 2022 (43,230 to 42,514). The fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) was 1.33 in 2022, ranging from a high of 1.85 to a low of 0.69 among States. Read all findings here.
Summary A statistical projection of traffic fatalities for the first half of 2024 shows an estimated 18,720 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes, a decrease of about 3.2 percent compared to 19,330 fatalities projected for the first half of 2023 (Early Estimate of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities in 2023, Report No. DOT HS 813 […]
In 2023 seat belt use in the United States ranged from 68.2 percent in the U.S. Virgin Islands to 98.4 percent in Hawaii. Twenty-seven States, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Mariana Islands achieved seat belt use rates of 90 percent or higher. These results are from probability-based observational surveys conducted […]
Robert Hampshire, with the U.S. Department of Transportation, joined CBS 42 Morning News to discuss the USDOT Smart Grant Kickoff that occurred Tuesday, September 24. The event was held at the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. The new pilot project is designed to create safer streets for all, including those who are blind, visually […]
A past research effort initiated by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) found that the combined workload of guidance (i.e., selection ofthe vehicle path) and control (i.e., physical operation of the vehicle) in the vicinity of interchanges creates a particularly challenging environment formotorists (Katz et al. 2018). At interchange ramp locations, drivers use cues from the […]