Implementing safety toolkit on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Montana

Sahima Nazneen,Mahdi Rezapour Mashhadi,Khaled Ksaibati

doi:10.14254/jsdtl.2020.5-1.1

Sahima Nazneen, Mahdi Rezapour Mashhadi + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.14254/jsdtl.2020.5-1.1

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Abstract

Indian Reservations have suffered from high crash rates that lead to fatal and incapacitating injuries for years. Among numerous issues, resource gap, rustic nature of the reservations, cross jurisdictional issues, and scarce crash data, act as obstacles in an effort to reduce the number of these fatal and serious crashes. Numerous organizations have recognized the importance of addressing issues on Indian reservations and improving roadway safety. Wyoming Technology Transfer Center / Local Technical Assistance Program (WYT2/LTAP) center developed a safety toolkit for tribal communities to ascertain high-risk crash locations and determine the low-cost safety improvement countermeasures. This safety toolkit acts as a guideline providing information, field examples, and resources in key topic areas to improve roadway safety through the use of the five-step methodology from Wyoming Rural Road Safety Program. These steps included compiling and crash data analysis, level I field evaluation, combined ranking, level II field evaluation, and benefit-cost analysis. In this study, the safety toolkit was implemented on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation (FPIR), Montana, to provide the tribes with a real-life example. This study reveals that low- cost safety countermeasures have significant impacts in reducing the number of fatal and serious injury crashes on the FPIR. This methodology with slight modification can be applied to other Indian reservations or similar entities to improve roadway safety.

Highlights

Roadway safety on Indian reservations has been one of the main concerns in the United States for decades
The safety toolkit was implemented on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation (FPIR), Montana, to provide the tribes with a real-life example
National Center for Statistics and Analysis stated that between the year of 1975 and 2002, the fatal crashes per year in Indian reservations increased by 52.5 percent, while the fatalities involved with crashes in the whole country dropped at a rate of 2.2 percent ( (Poindexter, 2004)

Summary

Introduction

Roadway safety on Indian reservations has been one of the main concerns in the United States for decades. To improve roadway safety on Indian reservations, addressing these challenges and determining factors contributing to the high crash rate are essential. Indian Reservations consist of about 145,000 miles of roadway under the jurisdiction of the tribal, federal, state, and local governments (Highways and Highway Safety on Indian Lands, 2016). Motorists travel more than 2 billion vehicle miles (3.2 billion vehicle kilometers) each year on the Indian Reservation Roads (IRR) (Sullivan & Martin, 2009). These roads has been witnessing higher rate of fatal crashes over the years than the other areas across the United States (Highways and Highway Safety on Indian Lands, 2016). According to the BIA reports in 2014, 83% of the BIA-system road miles were not in acceptable conditions (Highways and Highway Safety on Indian Lands, 2016)

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