6 Ways We Can Save 60,000+ Lives by Fixing Our Roads

AAA put out a report that details how we can save 60,000 lives and 350,000 serious injuries. Find out what 6 fixes they recommend. Watch More - https://goo.gl/zYYvJF

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If I told you that we could save 60,000 people’s lives just by making a few simple changes to our roads, would you believe me?

AAA just released a report that outlines 6 ways we can make that a reality. Stick around to find out how it could be done.

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Since 1949 fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles of travel has dropped by 85%. Every day people are working to move Toward Zero Deaths across all methods of travel.

As a part of that goal AAA put out a report called “Safety Benefits of Highway Infrastructure Investments” and recommends 6 different improvements that have the potential to prevent nearly 350,000 serious injuries and more than 60,000 deaths over 20 years.

The changes overall aren’t complicated, but are definitely costly. AAA says the total plan would cost 134 billion dollars with 6 billion dollars for maintenance at the 5, 10 and 15 year marks. However crash reduction benefits would total around 350 billion dollars.

AAA ranked improvements by percent of overall reduction in crashes if the entire 146 billion dollars was spent.

The 6th main category of improvements is adding and widening shoulders. Just by adding an extra two feet of paved shoulder to a 6 foot dirt shoulder, accidents were cut in half over a five year period. Why? The pavement adds just enough extra room to maneuver around obstacles and prevent crashes.

Coming in at the 5th most effective improvement is adding rumble strips. They found shoulder rumble strips to be effective but centerline rumble strips to be the most effective. Rumble Strips in the center of an undivided highway can alert a driver take corrective action before a head on crash occurs.

4th on the list is adding median barriers to divided highways. These barriers prevent vehicles from crossing through the median and colliding with an oncoming car or truck from the other side. AAA suggests high tension cable barriers since they are less expensive per mile than concrete barriers.

20% of the overall crash reduction would come from adding sidewalks, pedestrian crossings and other pedestrian facilities. Adding a signal to a crosswalk reduces fatal and serious injuries by 81%! And adding a cross walk alone would reduce injuries by 52%. Those are pretty impressive numbers.

Another 20% of the crash reduction could come from reducing roadside hazards like telephone poles and steep slopes. In one case study a road with a side slope of 27 degrees had a total of 58 crashes over 3 years. When the slope was changed to 10 degrees total crashes were reduced to 26, the majority of which were property damage only crashes.

The final improvement AAA recommends is intersection improvements which provides 30% of the overall reduction in crashes. This includes adding dedicated turn lanes, improved signal timing and converting conventional intersections to roundabouts.

Yep, get used to them. We may be seeing more traffic circles in the near future. The report states that a traditional four way intersection has up to 32 points of potential vehicle to vehicle contact and 24 points of vehicle to pedestrian contact.

A roundabout only has 8 of each type. Another paper found switching from an intersection to a roundabout reduced crashes by about 80%. This may not be as “easy” of a fix as the others, but provides the largest reduction in total crashes.

Now, before you start writing a comment about how much you hate roundabouts or the idiots who don’t know how to use them, be sure to subscribe. We post a new video every friday, and sometimes more. Until next time, I’m Ken with 4WheelOnline and you’ve just been refreshed.