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. 

The Uncool House on the Block

Halloween is Monday.  Trick-or-treating with your kids is a great time for parents to reinforce good walking and crossing habits.  My daughter and I took a walk together this week to a local fall festival.  Although it was still daylight when we started out on our walk, I carried a small flashlight and dressed us both in turquoise jackets with reflective detail.  Always curious, my daughter asked why I had the flashlight.  I used the opportunity to talk to her about pedestrian safety, “I want the cars to see us.  The flashlight makes us more conspicuous, as do our brightly colored jackets.  Have you ever heard the word conspicuous or conspicuity?”  She hadn’t.  “Conspicuity is the ability to pick out an object from it’s environment or background.  I want us to be conspicuous so the cars can see us.”  I gave her another example, “The dog’s Frisbees are orange so we can easily find them in the backyard.    They’re conspicuous.  If they were green, they’d blend in with the grass.”  She was quiet for a moment.  I could tell she was thinking; she’s very smart at four years old and spends a lot of time throwing the dog his Frisbees.   I prepared myself for the intelligent question on conspicuity that I was sure would follow.  “Mom, will there be candy at this party?”

Where there won’t be candy this Halloween is at our house .  My husband assures me we’ll have to clean eggs off our cars on Tuesday morning if we don’t give out candy.  I’m not worried.  The decision not to give out candy was out of concern for diabetics, our youngest daughter being one.  I've contemplated all the possible candy alternatives: apples, pencils, stickers, pamphlets on pedestrian safety.  All of those would probably get our cars egged. 

Whatever we give out, we will have to have at least 100 ready.  Our neighborhood sees a lot of pedestrian traffic on Halloween.  Most streets in the traditional neighborhood are lined with sidewalks, one of the reasons we decided to live here.  The sidewalks, coupled with the closely spaced lots, make for ideal trick-or-treating on foot.   There are also lots of young families, many of which attended the fall festival like me and my daughter. 

The festival was a lot of fun.  We spent most of our time at the jump house and playing the carnival games.  We got a small bag of popcorn, but no candy.  As we were leaving the jump house for the final time, three boys raced by us, their arms aglow in bright neon.  My daughter excitedly exclaimed, “Mom, where did they get the bracelets?  I want a bracelet!”  I smiled – Glow Bracelets – the perfect non-candy alternative for Halloween.  We'll be handing them out on Monday.  Maybe our house wouldn’t be so uncool afterall, at least in this regard.  At the very least, the neighborhood kids will be a bit more conspicuous as they walk from one house to the next in pursuit of candy.   

I’ll let you know on Tuesday if there are any eggs on our cars.

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.