Developing Safety Management Tools for State Departments of Transportation

Two safety management tools have recently been developed for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). One is the continuous risk profile (CRP) approach, which is a network screening procedure, and the other is the California Safety Analyst (CASA), a web-based application designed to assist state safety engineers in conducting safety investigations and in documenting their findings. This paper provides a qualitative description of the two tools and summarizes feedback from more than 100 Caltrans safety engineers who attended demonstrations of the web-based application. Findings from both empirical analysis and the survey indicate that CRP can significantly reduce the false positive rate and that CASA can greatly improve the efficiency of traffic safety investigations. However, misunderstandings remain about the relationship between the CRP approach, other methods explained in the Highway Safety Manual, and different safety management tools. The misunderstandings create challenges for the deployment of CRP and CASA in California.