Current fatality and serious injury trends continue to rise steeply for all road users, particularly vulnerable users, in both Washington State specifically and across the United States more broadly. While the United States Department of Transportation has formally adopted the Safe System Approach as part of its National Roadway Safety Strategy. The Safe System Approach calls for strengthening every part of the transportation system with safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds, safer road users, and post-crash care to create an overlap of countermeasures that prevent death and serious injury. 

While some guidance exists around strategizing and integrating the Safe System Approach into traffic safety management practice (e.g., Safe System Approach for Speed Management), more information is needed about how to proactively design and meaningfully retrofit roadways so that they reduce the kinetic energy that causes severe and fatal crashes. WSDOT is looking to implement the Safe System Approach to road safety within the Complete Streets context as a mechanism to reduce crashes for all road users generally, and in particular to eliminate fatal and serious injury crashes. To do so requires a thorough understanding of how the Safe System Approach can be implemented in the most effective manner. Such understanding from planning, design, and operations is necessary to improve decision making in ways that reduce the potential for fatal and serious injury crashes. 

This research will focus on the decision-making process and provide tools to enable this understanding. As WSDOT continues its implementation of the Safe System Approach within the Complete Streets context, a continued emphasis will be placed on developing methods, guides, worksheets, and tools to help assess the system and develop sound comprehensive project strategies.