Nevada Made Significant Progress Towards Safety Performance Targets

The Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) Safety Performance Management (Safety PM) is part of a strategic approach that uses system information to make investment and policy decisions to achieve national performance goals.

Performance management is a critical element in roadway safety and is measured by the number of lives lost and serious injuries sustained on Nevada’s roadways. Safety performance targets will help improve data, foster transparency and accountability, and allow safety progress to be tracked at the national and state levels. The Safety PM framework is used to assist in making progress toward improving road safety through the Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP), which requires a data-driven, strategic approach to improving highway safety through performance.

The Safety PM Final Rule establishes safety performance measure requirements for the purpose of carrying out the HSIP and to assess fatalities and serious injuries on all public roads. The five performance measures as five-year rolling averages include:

1. Number of Fatalities
2. Rate of Fatalities per 100 million Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT)
3. Number of Serious Injuries
4. Rate of Serious Injuries per 100 million VMT
5. Number of Non-motorized Fatalities and Non-motorized Serious Injuries

The Safety PM Final Rule also establishes the process for state departments of transportation (DOTs) and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to establish and report their safety targets, and the process that FHWA will use to assess whether state DOTs have met or made significant progress toward meeting their safety targets. FHWA will determine whether a state has met or made significant progress toward its safety performance targets at the end of the following calendar year when target-year data is available and findings are reported to states and the public. As of April 24, 2020, the FHWA has determined that Nevada has met or made significant progress towards achieving its safety performance targets.

The table below provides a summary of the target achievement determination.