How the Updated Highway Safety Manual Will Enhance Roadway Safety
Dan Cook, P.E., Explores New Guidance for Incorporating Safety Into Transportation Projects
Transportation agencies are tasked with improving their road networks to reduce fatal and serious injury crashes. Guidance from the Highway Safety Manual provides roadway practitioners with scientific methods for analyzing and predicting these crashes on many current road segments. But the upcoming second edition of the manual aims to fill in gaps from the HSM. New models and research will provide transportation engineers and others with additional guidance to improve road safety of pedestrian and bicyclists and rural highway users.
HDR Lead Engineer Dan Cook, P.E., has focused on improving traffic safety and traffic operations analysis. He has worked alongside other national experts in roadway safety design and operation on the newest version of the manual. In the latest from HDR’s Experts Talk interview series, he discusses key updates in HSM2, explains what they could mean for practitioners and transportation agencies and provides insight into prioritizing future road safety improvements across the U.S.
“The updated highway safety manual is giving us smarter ways to plan, prioritize and design safer roads,” Cook said. “It moves us beyond outdated crash rate analysis and toward more reliable methods for spotting real safety issues. Instead of using crash rates and observed crash frequencies that can sometimes lead us to fix locations that don’t actually have a problem, HSM2 focuses on methods that are backed by better data and more accurate predictions.”
HDR’s Experts Talk interview series shines a light on various aspects of transportation infrastructure design and delivery. Each subject matter expert offers unique expertise and insights about new and ongoing trends, emerging technologies and the human side of infrastructure.
Read the whole interview on updates to the Highway Safety Manual.
