Infrastructure Improvement Award: To South Carolina Department of Transportation for Crash Reduction By Improving Safety on Secondaries (CRISOS)
In response to an alarming death rate on South Carolina’s rural secondary roads, this program was developed as a countermeasure for fatal crashes. The state maintains just over 31,220 miles of roads. With narrow travel lanes, sharp curves and very narrow shoulders, the roads offer little room for recovery for an inattentive, speeding or inexperienced driver. Unfortunately, few safety resources were available to mitigate these safety problems.
Crash Reduction by Improving Safety on Secondaries (CRISOS) implements low cost, short-term engineering strategies to target the reduction of traffic injuries and fatalities on state- maintained rural secondary routes with the highest crash severity rankings. Education, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and enforcement strategies complement engineering efforts. The South Carolina Department of Transportation (SC DOT) met with state EMS and public
information and education specialists and gained their support to conduct educational efforts. Law enforcement agencies agreed to target additional enforcement on CRISOS roads. As a result, increased citations were issued and preliminary results from six CRISOS-completed roads show a 47.6% decrease in fatalities and a 16.5% decrease in injuries from a five-year average.Road safety audits, using multidisciplinary teams, were utilized to identify the safety problems on selected roads and to develop prioritized recommendations for short-term, intermediate and long-term improvement strategies. Specific outreach was made to other safety partners for assistance with the program including the involvement of EMS with educational programs and both local law enforcement agencies and the Highway Patrol with targeted enforcement efforts.
SC DOT was able to stretch limited financial resources with FHWA assistance in converting state matching dollars for use in funding the program. Evaluation data for all roads was compiled prior to implementation and SC DOT is continuing to collect data to determine the ongoing effectiveness of strategies mplemented.
For more information, contact:
Dipak Patel
South Carolina Department of Transportation Safety Office
Telephone: 803-737-7900
Email: pateldm@scdot.org
Rev. 10/30/07