Public Involvement is much more than posting notices and holding public hearings. Public participation involves creative thinking, with willingness and ability to interact openly to the public's preferred forms of communication. It is about being sensitive to disparate needs and conflicting priorities. It is about giving the public an opportunity to influence transportation decisionmaking. This course walks the talk by employing public involvement techniques as the means of conveying the key learning outcomes. It is a joint effort among FTA's Office of Planning, NTI, the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) Office of Planning, and the National Highway Institute (NHI) and was recently updated to reflect changes in the Federal Transportation reauthorization.

This course does not focus on the NEPA process, but on more general strategies and tools of engaging the public .

Our roads and highways form a complex system. Infrastructure that makes travelers safer in one circumstance won't necessarily work in another. Likewise, what makes a roadway efficient for some users excludes others; think of high-speed arterials without sidewalks because planners deemed the roads unsafe for pedestrians.

That's an example of single-modal thinking, and implementing such measures has reduced crash and fatality rates. But those reductions have leveled off over time as we've reached the limits of what single-mode interventions- or those rooted in a single engineering discipline - can achieve. Further improvements must come from countermeasures that address road safety across all modes and from solutions based on multidisciplinary science and research.

Introduction to Highway Safety Fundamentals begins to explore the growing body of knowledge that underlies the safety transportation profession today. Participants will take away a new understanding of road safety defined by a science-based perspective that results in both fewer accidents and the mitigation of consequences when they do occur. It does so in part by emphasizing the "4 Es" of road safety: engineering, education, enforcement and emergency response.

The workshop is intended for design, traffic, safety, utilities, maintenance and operations engineers; transportation and land use planners; law enforcement; agency directors; project managers; inspectors; emergency response personnel; and safety data collectors, managers and analysts .

Preventive road risk assessment procedures are an effective and essential instrument to help road authorities reduce the number of crashes and casualties, because design standards alone cannot guarantee road safety in all conditions.

Risk assessment procedures can typically be applied at successive stages of road planning, design, opening and operations. They all serve the common purpose of identifying risk factors related to road design or traffic control that may lead to crashes, or make crashes more severe. In many cases, they help network highway operators and city traffic departments identify engineering weaknesses and hazardous road sections, even in the absence of robust traffic injury data.

In 2015, 82.5% of countries reported implementing one or more of these procedures, yet over 70% of roads surveyed by the International Road Assessment Program (iRAP) in emerging countries were rated under 2 stars across at least one user category. These figures suggest a startling disconnect between the theoretical merits of safe road infrastructure management and the actual results experienced by countless road users every day. In 2017, UN Member States agreed on global performance targets for road safety that include ensuring all new roads are built to 3-star or better standard, and more than 75% of travel is on the equivalent of 3-star or better roads by 2030 .