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Road Safety Goals Hit A Bump in Arkansas

5 min read

In 2013, Arkansas released its Strategic Highway Safety Plan, which explained how the state wanted to lower road fatalities to 400 or fewer by the year 2017.

While Arkansas has shown improvement, it appears unlikely such an ambitious goal will be realized. The state, traditionally one of the worst nationally in deaths per 1 million vehicle miles, has seen a recent increase in fatalities — they are also up nationally — as lower gas prices have encouraged more drivers to hit the road.

Until 2015, Arkansas had been making progress. Arkansas had 551 road fatalities in 2011 and 560 in 2012, both statistically the same 1.67 deaths per 1 million vehicle miles.

The number dropped to 498 (1.49) in 2013 and further to 470 (1.38) in 2014. The national average those same years varied between 1.08 and 1.14 deaths per 1 million vehicle miles.

In 2015, Arkansas jumped to 531 deaths, while deaths nationally rose from 32,744 to 35,072, the largest single year increase since 1966.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that deaths in the first half of 2016 were up 10.4 percent from the same period of 2015.

“We’ve been improving in Arkansas,” said Andy Brewer, assistant division engineer for transportation planning and policy for the Arkansas Highway & Transportation Department. “We’re still toward the bottom. A lot of that has to do with we’re more of a rural state and we have a lot of hilly roads. Just because of funding issues, our roads are not in as great of shape as other states’. We have things that work against us.”

Simple Things Help
Experts say that many deaths can be prevented by wearing seat belts or by driving sober and undistracted, and Arkansas has taken an active role in doing what it can to make state roads structurally safer.

In 2013, the state began a program of installing cable barriers in the medians separating lanes on interstates. The barriers are steel poles anchored in concrete with three steel cables that act as a catch fence to prevent errant vehicles from crossing medians into oncoming traffic.

Other states had been installing cable barriers, but Arkansas waited until a national study recommended standards for how and where they should be used. The state used $75 million in federal funds for the barriers.

Brewer said early results showed that the barriers eliminated head-on collisions, usually the most violent and deadly of vehicle crashes. That led the state to decide to install cable barriers on approximately 500 miles of qualified interstates — anywhere the medians between traffic lanes were 60 feet or less.

“When we did some analysis before and after, it was a big difference,” Brewer said. “Once we saw that we were like, ‘Wow, this is a no-brainer. We should implement this everywhere.’ We determined that the benefits far outweigh the costs.”

Arkansas also lines its highways and interstates with rumble strips — the grooves just off the road that cause vehicles to vibrate when they veer out of their lane. Rumble strips are much less expensive to install — approximately $1 million for 1,000 miles — and they can be helpful in alerting drivers who have strayed or dozed off.

Brewer said Arkansas is also making a change in its striping policy on major interstates and highways. The state has been using 4-inch tape to mark the center lanes and shoulders of roads, but Brewer said Arkansas has already used paint to make 6-inch stripes on more than 4,000 miles of roads.

Brewer said the expensive tape, while effective, would be scooped up whenever snowplows cleared roads after winter weather. The paint is cheaper and will be easier to maintain by putting a new coat on every two years.

“It gets real expensive to replace,” Brewer said of the tape. “Moving forward, we’re not going to use that expensive tape anymore; instead we’re going to use paint, which has little glass beads in it to be reflective at night.”

Reflector disks that line highways are another common victim to snow plows and traffic, but Brewer said the state will continue to use them. Their life expectancy is generally just a couple of years due to the wear and tear of vehicles hitting them.

Better Roads, Safer Roads
In 2011, Arkansas voters approved the Interstate Rehabilitation Program, which allowed the Highway Department to make some much-needed repairs to the state’s roads. Brewer said the department coordinated the highway repair with the cable-barrier installations.

“If we could just get rid of the potholes and the rutting, the basic stuff, having better signs and marking, that would definitely have a safety benefit,” Brewer said.

Better roads are safer. Arkansas realized that a stretch of Interstate 30 in Clark County had been the site of 70 off-road crashes during wet weather in four years.

The state decided to address this and a couple of other identified problem spots by using what is called ultra-thin bonded wearing course — it’s basically a treatment put on top of existing road that increases tire grip while whisking water away. The UTBWC caused accidents at the problem site to drop from 70 to four, and Arkansas earned a National Roadway Safety Award in 2015 from the Federal Highway Administration.

Better roads, cable barriers and reflective paint can all help prevent accidents, but Brewer said the best safety feature is an attentive, calm, educated driver; studies show driver error is the cause of 94 percent of all accidents. He said one reason Arkansas continues to struggle with road deaths is it is one of the poorest followers of the most basic safety rule: wearing seat belts.

According to State Police data, Brewer said, approximately 78 percent of Arkansas drivers wear seat belts, while many states are at nearly 100 percent. Wearing a seat belt, experts say, vastly improves the odds of surviving a vehicle accident.

It explains the frequency of “Click It or Ticket” commercials in Arkansas with stern-looking state troopers. In a revised 2015 study based on 2010 vehicle accidents and deaths, the Department of Transportation said the economic cost to the nation was $242 billion; when it factored in societal costs, the figure rose to $836 billion.

“Saving lives, that would be the benefit,” Brewer said. “Part of our mission is to provide a safe and efficient transportation system. The benefit is to the user.”

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