Speed Management for Safer Roads with Dr. Shauna Hallmark, Iowa State University, and Ginny O’Connor, toXcel

I want to start off with sort of a definition, if you will.

You know, we're talking today about speed management.

and people outside the field may think of something different when they hear that term speed management and even perhaps people in the field may have different understandings of what it means why don't we start with an explanation of how you see speed management and how people perhaps outside the field see speed management

so i think a lot of people think of are they hear speed management and they think we want to put speed bumps on every single road, and we want them to drive 20 miles an hour on an interstate and also give them speeding tickets every five minutes.

And so speed management is not that.

I don't want that either.

But speed management is about trying to help everybody get home safely.

So reducing the kinetic energy generated in a crash, reducing the risk of a crash in the first place.

And then also so much of what speed management is, is working together with other stakeholders.

So law enforcement, engineers, planners, land use officials, things like that, to work towards creating a road that is self-explaining and self-enforcing and reducing the exposure likelihood and severity of a fatal and severe injury crash.

Yeah, that's a great definition.

And we used to use the word traffic homing.

And I kind of like that because that sounds like something you would want to share at a public meeting.

Speed management sounds more coercive.

But I like the way Jenny put it.

And I think speed management is just trying to get people's speed to match the roadway and surrounding conditions so that drivers are able to see other road users, they're able to react, they're able to brake and do all the things that they need to do so that everybody can stay safe.

So, yeah, so I don't know between the two terms, speed management and traffic calming.

Speed management sometimes just has a, just the way it sounds can be off-putting, but that's not what it is.

I agree.

I'll add to what Shauna said that matching the roadway to the speed is also an aspect of speed management.

So figuring out what people are driving and if you can't lower speeds for whatever reason, matching the roadway to those speeds is also a piece of speed management.

Let me expand on that a little bit.

When you spot a road where there's a mismatch between operating speeds and a safe speed for that roadway, first of all, how do you spot that? And then what do you do once you do spot it?

One thing I would say that we've done a lot in the past as an industry is we focused on the crash data.

So focusing on fatal and severe injury crashes that are tagged as speeding related, but then that still focuses on, that uses a lot of the ambiguity from the crash reports where law enforcement officers that are reporting the speeds Don't always know what actually happened.