A Toolkit for Enhancing Safety on Indian Reservations

Download or read book A Toolkit for Enhancing Safety on Indian Reservations written by Sahima Nazneen and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indian Reservations are struggling with the highest fatal and incapacitating injuries related crashes across the United States. United States government and the U.S. Department of Transportation have been striving to improve roadway safety on Indian reservations to reduce such crashes. However, the rustic nature of the reservations, issues of jurisdictional coordination and collaboration, inadequate resources, limited crash data, and etc. make it challenging for the tribes to reduce the number of these fatal and serious crashes. One of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to enhance roadway safety is to identify high-risk rural road segments and select corresponding safety countermeasures. To this end, a safety toolkit was developed for tribal communities to ascertain high-risk crash locations and determine the low-cost safety improvement countermeasures. The safety toolkit consists of five steps: compile data and crash data analysis, level I field evaluation, combined ranking, level II field evaluation, and benefit-cost analysis. In this study, this safety toolkit was implemented on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation (FPIR), Montana to provide the tribes with a real-life example. In addition, statistical models were developed to determine the contributing factors affecting crash severity in the FPIR. Multiple Logistic Regression models were developed for all roadways within the FPIR. Impaired driving, collision with ditch/embankment, rollover crashes, and roadway types were found to be significant in contributing to fatal and injury crashes. This study also investigated the contributing factors to crash severity for the roads under three jurisdictions: Indian Tribe nation, County and City highway agency, and State highway agency. Impaired driving was found to be the most significant factor contributing to crash severity in all three roadway jurisdictions. Indian reservation roads were found to be possessing the highest risk of fatal and injury crashes due to impaired driving. Besides impaired driving, overturn/rollover crashes and collision with the ditch significantly contributed to increasing the risk associated with fatal and injury crashes. Finally, to ascertain high-risk crash locations, crash hotspots were analyzed based on crash severity and crash rates. Spatial analysis was carried out via the network kernel density map and the crash severity map to determine the most crash-prone roads. The toolkit developed and implemented in this study is recommended for implementation at all tribal communities nationwide.