Mendocino County (Calif.) Department of Transportation has been awarded the 2003 Highway Management TRANNY Award for its successful Road System Traffic Safety Review.
Eugene Calvert, Mendocino County's Director of Transportation, and Stephen Ford, civil engineer, accepted the award on behalf of the department at the annual California Transportation Foundation (CTF) awards banquet in Sacramento, Calif. CTF organizes the TRANNY Awards, which are presented to the most outstanding transportation program, project, person and organization each year.
The Traffic Safety Review is an ongoing program which identifies and corrects highway signage and pavement marking deficiencies. During the 1990s, the Mendocino County DOT developed the program to improve the safety on the arterials and collectors in their road system. The program includes an objective review of traffic control signage and markings. Identified deficiencies are then corrected.
The effectiveness of the program was measured by comparing accident data for the reviewed roads with data for roads not included in, or influenced by, the reviews. To control for different groups of factors, two sets of control roads were selected: county maintained roads not reviews and state highways within the system. Over two consecutive three-year review cycles the number of accidents on the reviewed roads fell by more than 42%. The results were significantly better than the control roads and yielded a cost benefit ratio greater than 1:150.
