A Primer on Safety Performance Measures for the Transportation Planning Process

Assessing Your Organization's Use of Safety Performance Measures

The following questions will help stakeholders review opportunities for developing safety performance measures and linking them to transportation planning and programming. This checklist is a tool for assessing an organization's current status in using safety performance measures in the transportation planning and decision-making process. The answers to these questions should be used to strategically identify actions that lead to the use of safety performance measures in planning and programming.

1. Is safety included in your agency's vision?
2. What safety challenges are facing your transportation system?
3. Is safety included in your planning vision, goals, and objectives?
4. Are safety performance measures currently used as part of the planning and decision-making process?
5. Are the safety performance measures related to the safety challenges?
6. Are (additional) safety performance measures needed or desired?
7. Who will be responsible for data collection and interpretation?
8. Has the proposed set of performance measures been discussed with those in the agency responsible for collecting data to ensure feasibility and accuracy of data collection?
9. Has a data collection strategy been formulated and implemented for the safety performance measures?
10. Do the evaluation criteria used in the planning process include criteria relating to safety performance measures?
11. Will the safety performance of the transportation system (as defined in the performance measures) likely respond to the types of strategies and projects that result from the planning process? If not, how are such strategies or projects furthered as part of the planning process?
12. Does the project prioritization or ranking scheme include criteria or indices related to the safety performance measures?
13. Are safety performance measures included in the system monitoring process?

Once these questions have been answered and an overall assessment of the current use of safety performance measures has been conducted, the process described in this document should be used to identify additional safety performance measures. In addition, the existing safety performance measures can be modified to increase their effectiveness.