Reducing crashes with Road Safety Audits

As engineers, it’s our job and our priority to produce plans that will be safe for the public and improve the safety of existing projects. Road Safety Audits (RSA) are a great way to do this.

At our Pulaski, Tennessee office, we’ve been employed by the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) on several RSA projects. Our engineers have been able to gain a lot of valuable experience that we’re passing on to our Alabama and Louisiana offices.

A RSA is defined as “a formal safety performance examination of an existing or future road or intersection by an independent audit team.”

RSAs can be critically important for many reasons – here are a few to contemplate:

• In the U.S., 43,000 individuals are killed and three million are injured in car crashes every year.
• One out of 100 children born this year will die violently in a highway crash.
• 70 out of those 100 children will be injured in a crash.
• The societal cost of highway crashes is $230 billion a year.

We can all agree those statistics are staggering!  RSA’s can reduce the number and severity of crashes, promote awareness and safe practices, identify and address problems and take into consideration human factors and multimodal issues. RSAs are also a low cost way to get all of this done, usually coming in at under $10,000.

In our next blog post, we will discuss the various steps that make up a Road Safety Audit.