Developing a Toolkit to Improve Transportation Safety on Indian Reservations

Abstract

Indian reservations hold the highest rate of crashes that lead to fatal and incapacitating injuries across the United States. Limited resources, absence of coordination across jurisdictions, and limited crash data make it difficult for tribes to reduce the number of these fatal and serious crashes. A safety toolkit was developed in this work to identify the high-risk crash locations and determine low-cost safety improvement countermeasures. The toolkit serves as a guideline and provides information, field examples, and resources in key topic areas to lead the effort to improve safety via the use of a five-step methodology. These five steps are, namely, compile data and crash data analysis, Level I field evaluation, combined ranking, Level II field evaluation to identify countermeasures, and benefit–cost analysis. The objective of the toolkit is to assist tribes to reduce the number of fatal and serious crashes, and provides flexibility for the tribes to utilize the methodology compatible with the onsite data, preferences of the tribes, and other factors to meet demands. The methodology described was successfully implemented on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe, and the Yankton Sioux Tribe and showed great success in identifying high-crash locations.