DESIGN STRATEGIES

Implementation strategies as tools to improve the safety and experience of all users in a community.

There are multiple strategies which effectively reduce the incidence of crashes within a community. This section will identify different issues and problems that may be occurring within the community and provide ways of addressing them with designbased solutions.

Note: While there are multiple solutions, no one strategy is a correct or definitive solution, and work best partnered with at least one or more additional strategies to be the most effective in achieving the goal(s) set for you community.

Countermeasures

Countermeasures should be thought out prior to the implementation of them. These changes are usually the result of data analysis as discussed in the previous section.

Systemic Versus Systematic Versus Site Specific

Countermeasures should be thought out prior to the implementation of them. This can be done through temporary installations to test and see if the countermeasure is effective, or it can be done through data interpretation to determine what the best approach for installing countermeasures is. While not all countermeasures can be temporary depending on scale, location, and the countermeasure strategy, design elements can be implemented at various levels. This means that, after analysis of a site or data as a whole, local officials must determine the best countermeasure(s) for either one specific site, a few sites, or sites across a whole community.

These are broken down into various approaches:

/ Site Specific: Deploy countermeasure at one problematic location

/ Systemic: Deploy countermeasures at locations with the greatest risk

/ Systematic: Deploy countermeasures at all locations

Each approach is completely dependent on the situation a community is facing. Updating signage is something that would likely be done community wide, while installing a round-a-bout would be more site specific.

A design strategies matrix will help to determine various approaches for what conditions are most appropriate to use them, as well as a cost category, if it can be a temporary installation, and how it can be best implemented with each of the approaches listed above.

HOW TO DETERMINE RISK FACTORS?

Determining risk factors will be done through analysis of data primarily but can be done using a visual audit as well. A visual audit is when a person or group of people go and examine an area, stretch of road, and/or intersection where a crash or accident happened. The person or group is then to determine if there were any factors that may have contributed to the crash or accident such as a covered stop sign, lack of road signage, low visibility of a curve, faded lines on the roadway, etc. This information is then recorded through pictures and notes, and eventually corrected in the near future.

Data analysis of crash data is specifically important as crashes may be specific to current road conditions such as wet pavement. This might call for additional measures to be taken to increase road traction, or even evaluate how water is draining in the area to know how to best approach the problem.