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September 2007
CERS Institute explores public health aspects of rural transportation safety
Anthony Kane
Tom Horan
Max Donath
Mick Rakauskas
Bernie Arseneau
Colleen Landkamer
Speakers explored the connections between rural transportation safety and community health at the Center for Excellence in Rural Safety’s annual Summer Institute, held at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington on July 30 and 31.
Presentations converged around a common desire to drastically reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries due to crashes on rural roads. Nationally, about 60 percent of traffic fatalities are rural, the majority of which occur on rural, two-lane roads. Health costs each year due to motor vehicle crashes have been estimated at $230 billion, or 2.3 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.
“Think about it. They’re your friends, they’re your coworkers, cousins, relatives—someone’s going to be touched by it,” said keynote speaker Anthony Kane, engineering and technical services director with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). “We need to get the political will and leadership to address it. Health care costs can be a vehicle to do it.”
This was the second meeting of an annual Summer Institute held by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Excellence in Rural Safety (CERS). The two-day gathering, hosted this year in cooperation with the new UVM Transportation Center and the New England Transportation Institute (NETI), is aimed at sharing information, setting research priorities, and developing strategies for improving rural transportation safety. Leading state and national transportation officials, researchers, policymakers, and professionals attended the meeting.
CERS, which was established by the 2005 federal transportation act, is a program led by Lee Munnich of the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs in cooperation with CTS and sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration. Other partners include NETI and the School of Information Systems and Technology at Claremont Graduate University.
CTS director Robert Johns served as master of ceremonies. Speakers representing the University of Minnesota included Tom Horan, CERS research director and visiting scholar at the Humphrey Institute, who shared the latest CERS research into the public health aspects of rural transportation safety; Max Donath, director of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Institute at CTS, who described human-centered technologies for reducing fatalities and life-changing crashes; and Mick Rakauskas, a research fellow with the HumanFIRST Program at the ITS Institute, who discussed attitudes and behaviors associated with rural fatal crash risk.
Bernie Arseneau, Minnesota Toward Zero Deaths Program co-chair and director of the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) Office of Traffic, Safety and Operations, helped conclude the event by summing up the information and ideas presented over the two days. In addition, Blue Earth County commissioner Colleen Landkamer, a member of the CTS Executive Committee, moderated a panel discussion on rural driving behavior.
Other panels addressed technological solutions for improving rural safety and community health; a community perspective on transportation, health, and safety; and innovative national policies for safety and health.
Developmental psychologist Jean-Pascal Assailly, research director for Paris-based INRETS, a public research institute under the auspices of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Transports, provided another keynote, focusing on the causes of young driver crashes. Assailly, along with Sonja Forward, a senior research fellow and psychologist with the Swedish Road and Transport Research Institute, contributed an international perspective that reinforced the universal nature of rural transportation safety challenges. They also shared their research and policy successes.
In the end, most agreed that rural transportation safety is a public health issue in need of strong leadership, partnerships and collaboration, more behavioral research, and direct, personal, unvarnished communications campaigns to engage the public.
“It’s time that we as a nation adopt a “toward zero deaths’ vision,” Mn/DOT’s Arseneau said. “By having that long-term goal, we’re able to continue our focus on our journey. Our journey is to reduce those deaths to zero.”
To read more about the meeting and the Center, please visit www.ruralsafety.umn.edu.