How “Proven Safety Countermeasures” Save Lives

A federal list of road design elements called “proven safety countermeasures” could hold the key to improved road safety, says former Federal Highway Administration Administrator Shailen Bhatt.

As Kea Wilson explains in Streetsblog USA, “these measures offer safety benefits that have been meticulously proven and quantified by U.S. DOT itself, in the hyper-specific contexts in which traffic engineers might use them — a far higher and more important bar to clear in the bureaucratic world of state DOTs.”

Currently, state DOTs must offer a 10 percent match to receive federal funding for safety projects, meaning they’re often deprioritized in states with low resources. A proposed bill, the Sarah Debbink Langenkamp Act, would allow state DOTs to use 100 percent federal money for safety measures, eliminating the 10 percent local match. “Even as America enters an uncertain new era, supporters of the Langenkamp bill say strategies like protected bike lanes are becoming increasingly normalized in the minds of American transportation officials, thanks in no small part to their status as a proven safety countermeasures.”

According to Wilson, “Increasing state control over how communities make their roads safer is a message that advocates hope a GOP-held Congress can get behind — especially since the bill wouldn't touch a separate federal law that prohibits states from spending more than 10 percent of their total safety money on projects for which the federal government is paying 100 percent of the cost.”