Safety of the State Highway System on the Wind River Indian Reservation PDF Download

Author: Trenna Lee Terrill
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781369234282
Category : Indian roads
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Roadway safety on Indian Reservations has become a significant concern for the United States government, and the U.S. Department of Transportation is striving to eliminate fatal and serious injury crashes. Over the past several years there has been a steady decline in fatal crashes across the country, yet fatal crash rates continue to increase on tribal lands. In collaboration with the goal to eliminate fatal and serious crashes, the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT) partnered with the Wyoming Technology Transfer Center/Local Technical Assistance Program (WYT2/LTAP) to address the high fatality rates on the Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR) in response to the Wyoming Strategic Highway Safety Plan. The rural nature of the reservation, behavioral factors, and physical aspects of the roadways have contributed to fatal crash rates on the WRIR. It has been difficult for the tribes to implement a safety improvement program. A previous methodology to reduce fatal and serious crash rates was successfully implemented on the Wind River Indian Reservation local roadways. WYDOT and the tribal leadership have requested a similar methodology to implement on the state highway system within the reservation. The success of this project was heavily dependent on collaboration among transportation safety stakeholders. Key contributors were the State Department of Transportation, tribal leadership, the Local and Tribal Technical Assistance Program (LTAP & TTAP), Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and local and tribal law enforcement. The methodology presented in this research is dedicated to assisting WYDOT and the tribal leadership in reducing fatal and injury crash rates on their reservation. As a part of the previous methodology implemented on the WRIR local roadways, the tribal leadership, and other involved agencies developed a Strategic Highway Safety Plan. The WRIR is in the process of adjusting their strategic safety plan by utilizing the crash analysis accomplished in this study. The crash analysis also supplies a tool to visualize comparisons between the three roadway systems. The three systems are as follows: (1) all U.S. and State Highways within Wyoming; (2) all U.S. and State Highways within the WRIR; and (3) all County and Indian Reservation Roads within the WRIR. This tool identifies comparisons that focus on the conditions of tribal roads versus the state highways, as well as differences between behavioral and other physical aspects of the roads between the two roadway systems. Statistical models are routinely used by researchers to quantify factors that are often left to intuition, uncertainty, and incomplete information. Various types of statistical models have been developed to assist transportation engineers in determining factors related to specific types of crashes. They use these models as a guide to identify which countermeasures would most likely improve roadway safety. Few models have addressed crashes on rural roadways, and even fewer have investigated crashes on Indian Reservations. This study analyzes the crash severity for three rural roadway systems in Wyoming, and the WRIR, using ordinal polytomous logistic regression. The same three rural roadway systems were analyzed for comparisons between the physical conditions of the roadways using a one way analysis of variance. The crash severity on only the U.S. and State Highways within the WRIR were also analyzed in comparison with average daily traffic counts using a multiple logistic regression. The final statistical analysis involved a simple one-sided t-test to investigate a possible speeding issue on the reservation. The proposed methodology is in the process of being successfully implemented on the state and U.S. highways within the WRIR. Tribal leaders are now able to receive the resources they need to keep their communities safe and sustainable. The results found within this research are currently being incorporated into their strategic safety plan.