The measurement of safety performance is a critical task for transportation agencies to monitor the quality of services and evaluate operation efficiency. This article presents and compares safety performance between and among four passenger transportation modes in the United States-highway, transit, railroad, and aviation-using national data from 2002 through 2010. The research utilizes data collected and reported by transportation agencies to meet federal reporting requirements and does not involve the collection of additional data. After a brief review and comparison of transportationsafety performance definitions, the authors evaluate three different types of metrics: number, ratio, and rate, which are applied to all four modes. This article highlights the approach used to compare the share of fatalities/injuries of a particular mode to its share of personal (for highway mode) or passenger (for transit, rail, and aviation) miles traveled compared to the overall multimodal passenger transportation systems. The "shift-share" method is a viable approach to achieve consistent apples-to-apples comparisons. The study shows that aviation and rail are the safest modes for travel between cities, and transit is safer than automobiles for local travel.
Worsening traffic congestion and air pollution, rising road maintenance and construction costs, and escalating health risks from obesity to cardiovascular disease are among major motives triggering the attention of transportation authorities to walking and cycling. Increasing local demands to improve pedestrian/cyclist facilities place a burden on public authorities to balance limited resources with increasing demand. Fund scarcity is the major impediment to satisfy a high demand received from communities in all levels particularly from urban and suburban communities to improve cyclist and pedestrian facilities. To allocate funds to the most worthy and deserving projects, many standards, and procedures are followed by public agencies (nationally and globally) to prioritize projects for funding. Review of practices nationwide has shown that no acceptable standard follows by States and local governments and each state or even county has developed their own methodology to score and rank projects. To facilitate decision makers in prioritizing improvement projects, this study developed a ranking methodology and measurement technique to score each improvement project recommended to lessen the deficiencies of pedestrian/cyclist facility. The study delineates seven determinants to measure the effectiveness of each proposed project and rank them for funding. 17. Key Words 18. Distribution Statement No restrictions 19. Security Classification (of this report) Unclassified 20. Security Classification
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.