Safety work often happens one project at a time: a signal retimed here, a crosswalk repainted there, each one justified by whatever crash came before it. Meanwhile, capital budgets, design standards, and development review usually sit with different teams, run on different funding cycles, and respond to different priorities. When those upstream pieces don’t work together, progress made on one project can unintentionally be undone by a decision made somewhere else.

With our subconsultant partners VHB and Horizon 54, we recently led the development of NCHRP Research Report 1181, Toolkit for Institutionalizing the Safe System Approach, through NCHRP Project 08-171. The toolkit includes 30 tools, each with several case studies showing what institutionalization looks like in practice, organized across four themes: building institutional commitment, updating policies and budgets, revising design standards, and integrating land use. Together, they make it easier for safety to become part of how an agency already works, not a program bolted on top.

For readers who want to go deeper, the full research behind the toolkit, including literature review, agency interviews, and case study analysis, is documented in NCHRP Web-Only Document 451.

New IIHS Safe System Success Stories Released

A second collection of Safe System “Success Stories” was released last week at ITE International in Detroit. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) led this effort in partnership with the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the Vision Zero Network, and SafeTREC at UC Berkeley. We’re proud to support the work as a co-sponsor and co-author.

Several of the featured projects are what we call safety multipliers. Rather than focusing on a single factor, they address multiple Safe System levers, including exposure, severity, and likelihood.

Click through three examples below.