Synthesis of Safety for Traffic Operations - Transports Canada

Introduction
Before proceeding, a few important points should be highlighted about the above
definition:
• Judicious use – Safety is one of several competing objectives in designing and
operating road systems. In some instances, environmental protection, economic
considerations, or some other competing objective may warrant a trade-off in
safety. It is not sufficient to simply seek out the safest alternative and force it’s
implementation without due regard for the other system objectives. On the other
hand, if safety is to be compromised for the sake of other objectives, then the
practitioner should be able to reasonably quantify the safety consequences.
• Current best evidence – Firstly, the term ‘current’ is meant to remind practitioners
that the science of road safety is continuously evolving. While documents such as
this are helpful in determining the conventional wisdom, the literature is static and
at some point it may be outdated by new research. Secondly, the term evidence
should serve to remind the practitioner that decisions must be rooted in sound
knowledge and not anecdotes and folklore.
Further information on evidence-based road safety is found in Appendix A.
Mindful of the above goals, the Synthesis was developed with the following objectives:
• Focus on traffic operations and control strategies;
• The target audience is practitioners and other transportation professionals that
make decisions and recommendations respecting traffic operations and control
strategies;
• Include research and studies that report on crash occurrence, crash severity, or
crash surrogates with a proven correlation to crashes; and
• As much as possible synthesize Canadian research using Canadian datasets.
This last objective proved to be overly optimistic. At the start of the project it was
believed that practitioners had a vast storehouse of traffic safety research that was
unpublished. As it turns out, this is not the case. While certainly some information is
unpublished and residing in government files, it appears that mainly due to human and
financial resource limitations, practitioners are not undertaking evaluations.
Page 2