Cost-Effectiveness Sketch Method for Safety Investment Decision Making

The recent Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act emphasizes a performance-based, outcome-driven planning process to meet performance targets. One area of performance-based planning highlighted by the legislation is safety planning. State departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations will be required to document how their strategic highway safety plan supports the state safety performance targets. Currently, for safety improvements to be maximized for every dollar of investment, a cost-effectiveness analysis is used within subdisciplines of safety planning but is rarely used to compare projects across the four Es of safety: engineering, education, enforcement, and emergency medical services. A sketch method is proposed for analyzing cost-effectiveness of safety investment decision making across the four Es. The sketch-level method is appropriate when quantitative project information, such as crash reduction effectiveness, target population, and duration of project effectiveness are unavailable or are not complete. The sketch method results in multidisciplinary safety investments grouped by their relative cost-effectiveness; this method allows practitioners to use this information to prioritize investments for implementation. Results from a demonstration application of the sketch method to safety projects provided by the North Carolina Department of Transportation are presented.