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Mission Critical: Saving Your Life
Center for Transportation Safety, Five Years Later
By Rick Davenport
You won’t find this fact in any Texas Chamber of Commerce or Visitors Bureau literature: Texas has one of the worst driving records in the nation, and in some cases, the worst. Compared to the national average, Texas has significantly more traffic deaths, more fatalities caused by drunk drivers and more fatalities caused by speeding drivers.
It’s those grim statistics that prompted the 2001 legislative creation of the Center for Transportation Safety (CTS), a research think-tank aimed at saving lives by making travel in Texas safer. CTS recently celebrated its 5th Anniversary and has already accumulated a laundry list of accomplishments. For example, CTS:
- Analyzed years of crash information to pinpoint those rural roadways needing safety improvements. The result was a statewide safety review of narrow Farm to Market roads in Texas that led to reduced speed limits on some roads and paved shoulders and edge lines on others
- Recommended the best use of more than $600 million in safety bonds as appropriated in House Bill 3588. Much of the money is being spent on relatively low-cost but highly effective safety measures including turn lanes and lane widening on highways throughout the state
- Drafted a comprehensive, data-driven Strategic Highway Safety Plan for the Texas Department of Transportation, focused on identifying and then implementing the most cost-effective safety countermeasures to address the most critical safety problems
Because of its accomplishments, the legislature, various public agencies and the news media have come to recognize CTS as the authoritative source for factual information on transportation safety.
“Making the state’s transportation system the safest in the nation is a substantial challenge,” says Michael Behrens, the executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation. “We rely on the Center for Transportation Safety to assist us in analyzing current safety issues and developing cost-effective safety solutions that we can effectively implement to help people get to their destinations as quickly and as safely as possible. The safety of the traveling public is always TxDOT’s number one priority. Safety is the foundation of every project we build and every program we manage.”
Texas has significantly more traffic deaths, more fatalities caused by drunk drivers and more fatalities caused by speeding drivers.
Although CTS was created to focus on the problems associated with all 79,000 miles of Texas roadway, it was a relatively tiny section of highway that was the impetus for the Center.
The year was 2001 and a 10-mile stretch of undivided, 4-lane Highway 6 between College Station and Navasota was the scene of numerous crashes and fatalities. Some of the locals were calling it the “Highway of Death,” and they were screaming for help. “It was definitely a frustrating time,” State Senator Steve Ogden recalls. “I came to realize that Texas had some huge traffic safety problems, but I knew we had the resources and the manpower to address them. So, I introduced Senate Bill 586, which created The Center for Transportation Safety.”
The Center is housed within the Texas Transportation Institute and it relies on a team of transportation researchers, policy analysts and support staff to come up with answers to often complicated safety questions: Why do 55 percent of all Texas traffic fatalities happen on rural roadways, when most travel volume is in urban freeways? To what extent are inherent human behaviors responsible for traffic crashes? What should be the top safety priorities in road construction or improvements?
In its short history, the CTS has conducted some $12 million in external research with clients ranging from the Federal Highway Administration to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Of course, our ultimate goal is to eliminate all traffic deaths and injuries,” says CTS Senior Research Scientist David Willis. “We hope we can one day brag that Texas has the safest driving record in the nation.”