Developing a Data-Driven Safety Assessment Framework for RITI Communities in Washington State

In the history of this country, rural, isolated, indigenous, and tribal (RITI) communities were commonly overlooked with regards to social infrastructure and support. This issue is evident in the development of the transportation networks of these areas and the distinct lack of road safety in these types of communities. RITI communities carry a significantly disproportionate amount of traffic collisions and fatalities compared to urban areas. In order to improve the traffic safety conditions of the RITI communities in Washington State, it is necessary to build a traffic safety management system. A baseline data platform was developed by integrating the collected safety related data for the RITI communities in Washington State in the Year 1 Center for Safety Equity in Transportation (CSET) project. Besides the baseline data, the traffic safety management also requires the safety assessment framework, which is the corner stone of the traffic safety management system. Therefore, this project aims to develop a data-driven safety assessment framework to enable an effective roadway safety management system and improve the traffic safety conditions for RITI communities. The framework is based on an effective and efficient database management system for traffic and crash-related data of the RITI communities. In addition, in order to assist transportation agencies in practices such as the identification of high-risk roadway segments, the developed database management system has powerful visualization functions. Besides the database management and visualization platform, this project also develops roadway safety performance indices and traffic safety assessment methods in the safety assessment framework. This project also provides guidance on how to utilize these safety performance indices and results of safety assessment methods for visualization and analysis

Developing a Data-Driven Safety Assessment Framework for RITI Communities in Washington State

The roadway safety of the Rural, Isolated, Tribal, or Indigenous (RITI) communities has become an important social issue in the United States. Official data from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) shows that, in 2012, 54 percent of all fatalities occurred on rural roads while only 19 percent of the US population lived in rural communities. Under the serious circumstances, this research aims to help the RITI communities to improve their roadway safety through the development of a roadway safety management system. Generally, a roadway safety management system includes two critical components, the baseline data platform and safety assessment framework. In our Year 1 and Year 2 CSET projects, a baseline data platform was developed by integrating the safety related data collected from the RITI communities in Washington State. This platform is capable of visualizing the accident records on the map. The Year 3 project further developed the safety data platform by developing crash data analysis and visualization functions. In addition, various roadway safety assessment methods had been developed to provide safety performance estimation, including historical accident data averages, predictions based on statistical and machine learning (ML) models, etc. Beside roadway safety assessment methods, this project investigated the safety countermeasures selection and recommendation methods for RITI communities. Specifically, the research team has reached out to RITI communities and established a formal research partnership with the Yakama Nation. The research team has conducted research on safety countermeasures analysis and recommendation for RITI communities