A Family-Based Highway Safety Plan

What does a Family-Based Highway Safety Plan Look like?

My friend and colleague, Mike Sawyer, posed an interesting question to me yesterday:  What would a family-based highway safety plan look like?  Mike had been reading a safety management document from Europe and it spurred the thought.  He observed that the base unit of protection with most U.S. federal agencies was considered to be the family but the same was not the case for highway safety.  For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has instructions for families to create an emergency management plan but for Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) the base unit was usually the state or local agency.  Federal guidance for highway safety is rarely provided at the family level.   The exception is behavioral measures such as the use of car seats – but as those of us in the engineering community know, that is only part of the solution.

I thought about his question for a moment and then realized that, although not formally documented, my family has a highway safety plan.  My husband, an economist by training, shares my interest in risk and understands that people often underestimate the risk of some behaviors (such as speeding or driving while fatigued) but overestimate the risk of other behaviors (such as avoiding red meat out of fear of contracting mad cow disease).  Over the years, we’ve had extensive discussions about highway safety risk which has culminated in our agreed upon protocol for transporting our family – effectively our family highway safety plan.

The following is my first attempt to describe our family highway safety plan.  As with most local or state strategic highway safety plans, our plan has four Es although slightly different. 

Exposure

The most important measure that we take to reduce our risk is monitoring our exposure.  We consciously try to reduce the number of miles our family drives in a year.  This was not born out of efforts to save gas or the environment (although both are worthy endeavors) but instead to reduce our family’s risk of a crash.  (As evidence of this, I’ve put less than 25,000 miles on my Subaru since purchasing it nearly five years ago.) 

Reducing our exposure means considering the following in our travel behaviors:

·         Trip Combinations.  Whenever possible, we combine trips so that multiple objectives can be accomplished from one destination.  The rise of mixed land-use development has helped us to do this.  We often frequent developments where, after parking our car, we can get dinner, pick up groceries, and allow the children to throw coins in a fountain.  (The added benefit here is that you only have to get them in and out of their car seats once.  Your back will thank you.)

·         Mail Ordering.  Mail ordering has become more prevalent with the widespread use of the Internet.  On our front porch the kids Halloween costumes, medical supplies, diapers, fall clothes for the kids, and an internet router all arrived just this week.  (A Fed-Ex package for the previous owner of the house also keeps showing up but that’s another story.)  I take advantage of free shipping whenever I can but I also know that the cost of shipping is small when I consider that it’s reduced my family’s exposure.  The drawback of this is that I get no less than seven catalogs in the mail every day.  The mailman is not exactly thrilled. 

·         Buying Local.  The large buy local movement is motivated by economic and environmental objectives however another benefit is that it means shorter trips or trips that are replaced by walking.  We live in a neighborhood that is close to downtown Raleigh and often walk to the post office, local pizza place, pharmacy, coffee shop, and bank.  With sidewalks leading to all of these places, a lot of our shopping is done locally. 

·         Parking.  Parking lots, although low speed, are scary places for me.  Most young children are not as tall as the hood of a car.  We try to find parking spaces that do not require crossing a road or busy parking lot, even if a long walk from our destination.  At some big box retailers, I find parking on the side of the building helps me to accomplish this goal. 

·         Flights.   Although rare, we fly whenever the trip is over five hours or so.  Although this is costly, the real benefit here, besides the reduced risk, is that you don’t have to hear “are we there yet?” as often and motion sickness is not as common.  (We didn’t take our own advice over the summer for a family reunion.  It took two days to get to Pennsylvania and no less than three of us were puked on by my four-year old.  I’ve learned my lesson.) 

Enforcement

As all parents know, whether we like it or not, part of our job is enforcement in the family.  At times I feel akin to a prison warden, particularly at church on Sunday morning, trying to keep the kids quiet in the pew like it is an hour-long jail cell.  Enforcement in our family highway safety plan includes the obvious monitoring of our children’s behaviors (e.g., you must wear your bike helmet or we take your bike away) but it also includes monitoring the behaviors of others responsible for their care.  We are very selective about who transports the kids, both walking and in the car.  When I was a child my dad would not let me or my siblings ride with my great-grandmother, Jessie.  She was 96 years old and at 4’11” she could barely see over the wheel of her 1970s Chevy Nova.  That one was obvious.  However, we’ve maintained tighter controls with our children and have extended our critique of suitable drivers to include behaviors such as whether they wear their seat belts, their cell phone use, speed selection, and use of defensive driving techniques.  At least one of the children’s aunts or uncles (who will go nameless) will never transport the kids based on their currently exhibited driving skills. 

Education

Children receive a lot of formal training on pedestrian safety both from their parents and schools.  For driving safety, the formal education does not start until the early teens.  The informal education starts much earlier.  Children learn from observing their parents.  Remember the first time you swore in front of your four-year old child or nephew?  Immediately they had a new vocabulary word that they wanted to share often and in public.  Similarly, children are observing our driving behavior.  It’s a good reminder to be better drivers: avoid cell phone use, use turn signals, keep our attention on the road.  For me, this means personifying the type of driver I want my girls to be when they turn 16 (or 25 if my husband has his way) every time I get in the car.

Engineering

Our route selection is based largely on the engineering of the facility.  We attempt to avoid roads where the design is not efficient for the prevailing speeds, roads with unfettered access, and rural roads that were formerly farm to market roads but now carry too much traffic.   When our trip is undertaken by foot, we only use routes that have sidewalks with good separation from the road and crossings that have appropriate measures such as sidewalks and pedestrian signals.  This means sometimes we don’t take the shortest distance between two points.  Probably not the worst thing for our health.

Our family highway safety plan continues to evolve.  Recently, my four-year old learned to open her own door and immediately tried the new skill out on the Interstate.  They keep us on our toes.  If you have a family highway safety plan or techniques to share, please post a comment or contact me via email at keccles@vhb.com.