The Importance of Strategy

The Military Civilian Workshop to Improve Highway Safety was held earlier this week at Fort Eustis, Virginia.  The Workshop is a tradition in Virginia, held annually for over 40 years.  The conference brings together what could be characterized as an army of partners in highway safety – military leaders, enforcement, first responders, engineers, media – to discuss strategic ways to improve highway safety. 

Military leaders may seem like unconventional partners in highway safety until you consider their responsibilities.  Many military bases are the size of small cities.  Fort Bragg here in my state has a population of 40,000 and covers 250 square miles.  Military leaders are responsible for safety on these large transportation networks within their bases and for the safety of their personnel (many of which are young, inexperienced drivers) as they travel outside the bases. Imagine being the traffic safety engineer for a town of 40,000 people where the average resident was under 25, single, male, and had a high risk tolerance.  It would be a challenging job to say the least.    

The two-day conference included numerous sessions to discuss strategic ways to improve highway safety on Virginia’s roadways, both on and off bases. 

The Workshop also provided the perfect setting to discuss Virginia’s new strategic highway safety plan.  States and some local agencies develop strategic highway safety plans to guide their safety improvement efforts.  The plans are collaborative and bring together partners from a broad perspective on highway safety, very similar to the participants at the Workshop. 

The following is an interview of Stephen Read, the Highway Safety Improvement Program Manager for the Virginia Department of Transportation and architect of Virginia’s new strategic highway safety plan.  The interview is conducted by Mike Sawyer, the former State Safety Engineer in Virginia and the architect of the previous strategic highway safety plan. 

These two Richmond gentlemen sat down over a glass of iced tea during a break at the Workshop.  Their conversation follows.

Mike:  Where do you see Virginia’s strategic plan headed and where is it at today?

Stephen: Like many other states, we’re in the process of updating our plan.  Our last plan had a four to six-year time period.  Ours has elapsed so we’re in the process of updating our vision, our mission, our goals and objectives, as well as our major strategies for our strategic plan. 

Mike:  How does the new vision or mission statement compare to the old plan?

Stephen:  One thing that has happened since the old plan is that there has been worldwide emphasis on the public health aspect of highway safety.  With international emphasis on working towards zero deaths (TZD), Virginia has adopted the vision now to look TZD; everyone should arrive at their destination safe and alive.  For our vision, we’re really working towards reducing not only deaths but serious injuries as well.  In our last plan we had goals and objectives that looked at all injury crashes.  In this plan, we’re going to look at those serious injuries that, without some sort of intervention in that crash, could have possibly been a fatality. 

Mike:  What are some of the key emphasis areas of this new plan?

Stephen:  Well, with the last plan the starting point was a lot of work from the late 90s that was more comprehensive in nature.  It had numerous emphasis areas that in some cases were overlapping or intermingled. With this plan, our attempt is to not leave these things off the table but to be a little bit more strategic on what we really think we can work on to drive the numbers down.  Our attempt is to look at 5 or 6 of those key emphasis areas.  Our last plan had 14 including two which were fundamental looking at the data and having good transportation safety planning.   Our hope right now is to go from the other 12, if you will, to get down to a targeted 6 emphasis area.  We looked at how each of those contributed to the deaths and severe injuries and decided on the new top 6 based on their contribution.

Mike:  What’s your schedule?  What are the next steps?

Stephen:  In September, we held Road Shows to educate folks about the plan, get their interest, and understand their issues with the emphasis areas.  We also asked them to get involved - review the strategies for the statewide plan but also think about developing regional plans and be involved at a more local level where they could target and develop more local plans within their own community.  At this point we have a list of folks, we have a governing body that we call the Steering Committee, and we’ve decided on leadership for each of the emphasis areas. 

We’re about to embark on a series of webinars and interactive dialog that will concentrate on the emphasis areas and strategies and also the potential actions that come out of those strategies.  Again, we want to refine not only the emphasis areas but also the strategies that come out of the emphasis areas so we can focus on the key things we need to be working on in the next five years.  The goal is to not put into the plan things that are actions or specific project or specific functions but to leave those more for the implementation plan in terms of the actions.

Mike:  Thank you for your time today.  It’s been great to hear what’s going on in Virginia.  We appreciate all your efforts.

Strategic, focused, and with an army of support, Virginia’s new strategic plan is on course to get more people home for Holiday Dinner every year.