 Hi there! I'm Barry Corbin. When I'm not working on my ranch here, you'll usually find me on a television set or a movie studio. Heck, I even did a one-man play at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. I was told by the director one time, he said, you've got to have a couple of stars on the show. But it's the supporting people that holds the whole thing together. They're the cement. They're the things that make it work. They're the texture. I understand that road safety audit teams are a lot like that. Sure, you've got the big guy or gal that designed the road or built it. They get a lot of the glory when the phrase is handed out, but just as it takes all the actors to make a good movie, it also takes all the discipline in the highway department to make a great section of roadway. And having a team of folks come in and add that extra dimension that a road safety audit provides is a double dosage of safety. And we need to do everything we can to be safe because we've got more traffic on the road and people are much more of a hurry today. But how do we do that? Well, we get people to stop drinking and driving. We get them to put on their seatbelts. We get them to slow down when they're in too much of a hurry. But we've got to do a lot more. We've got 42,000 people a year dying on the highway, and that's way too many. Now, when I was a kid growing up here in Texas about 200 miles west of here, it had these great big pecan trees. In the fall, you'd go around and they'd be pecans laying all over underneath them. Well, we'd pick those up and eat some of them, carry some home to our mothers to make pecan pie. But then when you'd run out of them, wanted more, you'd have to take a big old cane pole and knock them down out of the tree or shake the limb to make them fall. Well, that's kind of where we are with road safety right now. We've made things safer. We've designed better automobiles. We've got breakaway signs. We've got guardrails. We've got more people wearing their seatbelts now. But we've got to do more. Now is the time to shake those limbs. We've got to find more ways to make the roads safe, and that is going to require a new way of doing business. Road safety audits. A new way of doing business? Well, one might argue that highway agencies have been doing this for years. After all, they automatically build safety in when they're designing highways, don't they? True enough, but is that sufficient? Try telling that to someone who's lost someone in a car crash. The death rate on our highways is still too high. A road safety audit referred to as an RSA is a formal safety performance examination of an existing or future road or intersection by an independent multi-disciplinary team. Having a team of specialists in a variety of fields gives highways a fresh look from a different perspective and can reveal many potential areas for improvement. Also, situations change from the time a roadway was first constructed. The area around a highway can get built up in ways that weren't anticipated during its design and construction. An RSA can be conducted at any stage in the project development process, including on existing roads. Of course, it is easier to revise a plan than to make changes after you pour concrete. RSAs look at safety from the road user's perspective. Typical improvements include removal of sight distance obstructions, shoulder and lane modifications, adding or improving signs, pavement markings, delineators and barriers, consolidation of driveways, drainage improvements and pedestrian treatments. South Carolina DOT's RSA program has preliminarily had a positive impact on safety. Early results show reductions in crashes and fatalities between 12 and 60% for three of their sites. AAA Michigan conducted RSAs on 35 intersections in Detroit. Collectively, these intersections experienced a 39% decrease in total crashes and a 56% decrease in injury crashes. 22 of those intersections exceeded a benefit cost ratio of 2 to 1 in two years. So what exactly is involved with a road safety audit? Let's look at the process. First, identify the project or existing road to be audited. Next, select an interdisciplinary audit team. Third, conduct a pre-audit meeting to review project information and drawings. Fourth, perform field reviews under various conditions. Fifth, conduct audit analysis and prepare a report of findings. Then, present audit findings to the project owner or design team. Seventh, prepare your formal response. Lastly, incorporate your findings into the project as appropriate. Road safety audits don't take a lot of time. Using in-house independent staff, the average three to four person team takes two to three days to conduct an RSA. If you decide to hire an outside contractor, on average, outside expertise ranges from $5,000 to $15,000 per project. And several agencies have found that road safety audits provide them with an additional tool for reducing their auto fatality rates. Here in the Iowa Department of Transportation, we've implemented road safety audits on proposed resurfacing projects. What we're finding is our staff are now consistently looking for and implementing low-cost safety improvements in Iowa roadways. But they're not just for state-maintained highways. Road safety audits work well on local roadways too. Collier County, Florida has found a particular need for road safety audits if for no other reason than for the demographic makeup of their drivers. Many of our motorists are vacationers, seasonal residents, and elderly drivers. So their familiarity is not the same. And the response time is not the same as the younger, full-time resident. And that's the reason we've picked up on the idea of road safety audits. We've seen how these things can benefit us. And we're sold on that. We've got several corridors that are being audited and others coming up. And we're even hosting one of the RSA workshops in the near future. That's how much we are committed to this. If we can save one life in an intersection or improve safety through design revisions, the time and cost invested in road safety audit will be well justified. And I'm out here on the opposite corner of the country, Jean, in Clark County, Washington State. We're sold on them too. I know a lot of emphasis is put on state transportation agencies, but much of the traffic in this country is on the local roads. And we're finding out we can make a big difference in how we handle that traffic safely with road safety audits in city and county transportation agencies. While many agencies have embraced the road safety audit process, some are initially concerned that RSAs will increase their agency's liability for tort actions. Norrie Calvert at the Maryland State Highway Administration is a real proponent of the approach. The Maryland State Highway Administration believes RSAs are a valuable tool in building and maintaining a safer highway system. Maryland State Highway Administration has a policy of conducting roadway safety audits on our roadways. Courts are reluctant to second-guess the policy decisions of agencies. Roadway safety audits or RSAs are the right thing to do. Stephen Lamar, Senior Litigation Counsel for the Arizona Office of the Attorney General, recommends road safety audits as well. If folks keep to their mission, and that is to provide safe roads, then part of that would be having audits and checks to make sure that if we have problems, we can identify them and address them. I think the most important thing to do is to document what you're doing in a fairly concise, efficient way so that you can go back and explain if you end up taking action, why you took action, if you're exceeding the accepted standards and taking some action, that there's some memorialization that you thought about it, what the reasons were, what the standards were, and why you were taking the extra step if it is an extra step. It's always better to have a document that explains exactly what the situation is in a fair, logical, truthful, factual manner. The cases that we're defending now start out with the premise that the state of Arizona has exceeded the standard of care. One of a handful of states that, as we describe it, has stepped to the gold standard in protecting citizens against crossover accidents. And that's a great way to start the debate about whether we were negligent. So I believe, at least in that instance, seeing a problem, taking steps even though it wasn't required, has ended up putting us in a much better position in overall spending money on litigation costs in Arizona. But that doesn't mean we're not going to get sued. It just means we're better able to defend it. RSAs, a new way of doing business, making safe roads safer. Yep. Yeah, that's it. That's what we need. A new way of doing business.