People are constantly on the road; driving to work or school, running errands and visiting friends and family. Most people don’t think much about things like the placement of road signs and traffic lights or the sightlines of intersections, but the state and local officials in charge of the roads certainly do, and the safety of the roads we use every day is a primary concern for them.
Between 2015 and 2017 there were 4,873 fatal crashes and serious injuries as a result of automobile crashes on Connecticut’s public roadways. Forty-eight percent of these crashes occurred on local roads.
The Connecticut Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration has given the University of Connecticut a $1.3 million grant through the Transportation Technology Transfer Center to continue the Safety Circuit Rider Program for three more years.
The Technology Transfer Center is Connecticut’s Local Technical Assistance Program. The center provides education and technical assistance to members of Connecticut’s transportation and public safety community on transportation-related issues.
The center’s Safety Circuit Rider Program (SCR) helps municipalities develop safer conditions on their local roads through training, technical assistance and advice from Anthony A. Lorenzetti, P.E., a professional engineer who has many years of experience working with local agencies.
The program, which began in 2015, provides safety-related information, training and direct technical assistance to agencies responsible for the safety of local roadways. Through implementing these strategies, the program hopes to ultimately reduce the number of injuries and fatalities caused by accidents on local roads.
The program helps local municipalities identify roadway hazards through formal multi-disciplinary processes called Road Safety Assessments (RSAs) and offers advice about countermeasures to address safety concerns for all road users, including motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists. The SCR program’s template for RSA reports provide a consistent way to disseminate information about the results of RSA’s and resulting recommendations. Several towns in Connecticut have used this template to create their own Road Safety Assessment reports.
Local road safety agencies have the benefit of the assistance of a professional engineer working full-time for the program who is an expert in local road safety and a full time staff member of the UConn Transportation Technology Transfer Center.
Already, the SCR has provided training and or resources to almost all of the 169 cities and towns in Connecticut, through its various avenues of communication and means for assistance.
“The SCR Program has provided valuable outreach and educational opportunities for many Connecticut towns that would otherwise not be aware or have the technical or financial resources to engage in local road safety improvement efforts,” says Michael Gantick, P.E., director of Public Works for the Town of South Windsor.
Some of the road safety issues the SCR program has tackled include assisting the Connecticut DOT in their wide-scale local road initiatives to install center-line rumble strips and the horizontal curve safety project.
Another feature of the SCR program is the Equipment Loan Program. This facet of the initiative loans various pieces of equipment to local agencies including: retroreflectometers, which allows people to tell how brightly a sign or other road marking will be reflected back at headlights in the night; speed guns; ball bank indicators which are liquid-filled, curved glass tubes with a weighted ball in them. When mounted on a car driving a curve, the ball moves. The degree of movement provides information about how fast a car should safely take that curve; and “your speed” signs. These tools help municipalities develop advisory speed limits, evaluate curve radius, meet federal retroreflectivity requirements for towns and to help local agencies inform motorists of their speeds.
Through the Safety Academy training program transportation practitioners can receive a Safety Champion designation for completion of 40 hours of training through this program. Topics covered in these trainings include ADA Self-Evaluation and Transition Plans, Understanding Safety Data, Sign Installation and Maintenance, Road Safety Assessments, Designing for Pedestrians and Traffic Engineering principles for Law Enforcement.
Through its initial grant, the SCR program has help dozens of Connecticut communities. With this renewal, it can continue to do so, expanding its reach and improving the safety for even more of the drivers who use local roads every day.
“All of us in the SCR program, here at UConn, are very pleased that our partnership with the Connecticut Department of Transportation will allow us the opportunity to continue this important work to reduce fatalities and injuries on our roadways,” says Donna Shea, director of UConn’s Transportation Technology Transfer Center.
Shea has her master’s degree in adult learning from UConn. In 2014 she was named the Women’s Transportation Seminar’s Woman of the Year and in 2017 she received the APWA Donald C. Stone Excellence in Education award. She has been working at UConn since 1998.
