Equity in Transportation Safety

Equity in transportation is a key issue for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), as well as state departments of transportation. Equitable transportation ensures safety for all road users across all modes of transportation for all communities. FHWA recommends the adoption and equitable application of a safe system approach to achieve Vision Zero objectives to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries. A safe system fundamentally recognizes human error and accounts for it when designing systems and operations. Incorporating equity into roadway safety data is critical for conducting data-driven safety analysis. FHWA recommends collaboration with underserved communities through a process of collecting and analyzing data, engaging community representatives, implementing improvements, and evaluating impacts. Ensuring robust and accurate data is critical. State programs have worked to incorporate a wide variety of data into their crash models. Social and demographic data such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, education, employment status, income level, disability status, among many other variables, have been evaluated and demonstrated to be factors in the frequency of crashes. States have published mapping tools to visualize data trends and identify locations for targeted implementation efforts in conjunction with scoring metrics for evaluating proposed solutions.