The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), with the help of other highway safety stakeholders, developed and adopted a strategic highway safety plan (SHSP) in 1997, and updated this plan in 2005. NCHRP Report 500: Guidance for Implementation of the AASHTO Strategic Highway Safety Plan has been published in 23 volumes to address the objectives of the AASHTO plan. Furthermore, each state has its own SHSP, as do many safety stakeholder organizations. Given the history of these plans, there would be benefit to examining the experiences thus far to implement these plans. Strategies most effective in prompting action to achieve, or at least address, intended goals and objectives need to be evaluated and highlighted. More recently, the U.S. Department of Transportation (specifically through the Federal Highway Administration) and several highway safety-related professional associations have initiated an effort to develop a National Strategic Highway Safety Plan to be titled, “Toward Zero Deaths: A National Strategy on Highway Safety.” The national strategy is intended to be a guide or framework for safety stakeholder organizations to enhance current national, state, and local safety planning and implementation efforts. The plan will provide a wide array of accepted stakeholder strategies and innovative new strategies directed at institutional and cultural changes through the 4 E’s (education, enforcement, engineering, and emergency medical services). Identifying commonly accepted and successful strategies would contribute to the development of a national strategy by these stakeholder organizations. Unlike the earlier AASHTO plan, this national strategy will not be "owned" by any one organization. The strategy will cover a broad range of issues and can be utilized as a guide and framework by safety stakeholder organizations to enhance current state and local safety planning and implementation efforts. To assist in improvements to existing individual plans and serve as a resource for those interested in developing effective nationwide strategies, research is needed to identify successful strategies already deployed and to incorporate innovative countermeasures that go beyond the countermeasures already known to be effective.

The objective of this research was to identify strategies, existing and proposed, to achieve various safety-related goals over an extended period of 25 years. An array of potential strategies will be organized into a framework based on the desired safety outcome and the expected degree or rate of success. Via the framework, stakeholders will be presented with options for formulating their highway safety plans to address national, state, or local levels of activity. Strategies may also include new directions for needed research.

STATUS: The work has been completed, and the results have been forwarded to AASHTO.