State highway safety offices (SHSOs) apply funds administered by NHTSA that focus on road user behavior, while state departments of transportation (DOTs) administer funds focused on infrastructure improvements. Due to the differing nature of behavioral and infrastructure countermeasures, it is not currently possible to consider the effectiveness of both types countermeasures at a project level when evaluating alternatives. 

NHTSA’s Countermeasures That Work uses a five-star system to rate behavioral countermeasures based on the effectiveness. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) maintains the Crash Modification Factor (CMF) Clearinghouse, an online database that express the effectiveness of engineering- or infrastructure-based countermeasures.

NCHRP Project 17-60: Effectiveness of Behavioral Highway Safety Countermeasures, developed a benefit-cost methodology to support consideration of behavioral and infrastructure countermeasures similarly, though NCHRP 17-60 ultimately focused on developing a benefit-cost analysis framework that did not necessarily allow incorporation of these analyses into infrastructure projects. Behavioral countermeasures quantified in such a way so as to be considered in infrastructure project decisions would help agencies implement a more comprehensive approach to understanding safety impacts of funding decisions.

The objectives of this research are to:

1. Develop and refine a methodology for evaluating behavioral countermeasures—including consideration of spatial, temporal, and spillover effects—that will allow for applying the safety effectiveness information via a crash modification factor to safety projects involving behavioral countermeasure decisions.
2. Evaluate behavioral countermeasures with existing effectiveness studies, such as those with five stars in Countermeasures That Work, to develop CMFs for these countermeasures.
3. Review state best practices for analyzing the effectiveness of behavioral countermeasures to identify promising analytic methods including inferential statistics and modeling, especially those that can address concerns over regression-to-the-mean and common data limitations in assessments of behavioral change.
4. Evaluate the feasibility of applying the CMF rating methodology outlined in NCHRP Project 17-72 “Update of Crash Modification Factors for the Highway Safety Manual”, OR a modified version of the 17-72 rating methodology that considers factors limited to behavioral countermeasures.
5. Explore the feasibility of including behavioral countermeasures in the FHWA CMF Clearinghouse, including potential changes that may need to be made to the Clearinghouse system structure, and unique guidance and training necessary to instruct users on how to apply behavioral CMFs.