BACKGROUND

Under the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH), an ISPE is a critical assessment of a roadside safety hardware system that provides a sound basis for determining its crash performance. The roadside safety hardware in use today consists of a blend of systems meeting various crash performance criteria. A single, comprehensive data collection methodology and associated guidelines will provide a ready-to-use mechanism for agencies to collect the ideal data for conducting ISPEs and provide data which can be readily combined across multiple states or agencies, ultimately resulting in a more meaningful, universal data set for ISPEs.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this research was to develop a transportation agency data collection methodology and associated guidelines to support ISPEs of roadside safety hardware meeting MASH, NCHRP Report 350: Recommended Procedures for the Safety Performance Evaluation of Highway Features, and other criteria.

STATUS

Completed. The project's final report can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.17226/27911 . Guidelines for the collection, extraction, and documentation of ISPE data; and an implementation plan are also available to download.