Safety Analysis

Transportation safety data analysis provides planners, policy makers, and the public with a better understanding of where critical safety issues exist in the transportation system and what factors may be contributing to Temple MMP study area crashes and crash rates. As such, safety data analysis is a critical component of regional transportation planning.

The technical crash analysis presented in the following section reviews historical crash data within the City of Temple and surrounding ETJ over a five year period. The review of crash data encompasses an assessment of key transportation safety issues for both motorized and non-motorized users. The Temple MMP development process uses concepts and progam initiatives articulated in federal and state policy documents.

At the federal level, the Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) requires a data-driven, strategic approach that focuses on system safety performance to improve highway safety on all public roads. The federal HSIP also requires a state level Strategic Highway Safety Plan (SHSP) that defines the state safety goals and describes a program of strategies to improve safety in order to achieve a significant reduction in traffic fatalities and serious injuries on all public roads.

The 2017 update to the Texas SHSP acknowledged a steady increase in roadway fatalities, particularly in urban areas, since 2012, despite efforts to improve roadway user behavior and upgrade roadway conditions. The SHSP maintains a vision of moving to zero deaths on roadways, and represents a multidiscipline collaboration aspiring to make Texas travel safer by reducing crashes, fatalities, and injuries by focusing on seven key emphasis areas, including distracted driving, impaired driving, intersection safety, older road users, pedestrian safety, roadway and lane departures, and speeding.

The Temple MMP seeks to use the tools and metrics outlined in the HSIP and to achieve the goal of significantly reducing and eventually eliminating vehicle related fatalities in the Temple MMP study area, supporting the Texas SHSP goals.

The analysis detailed in this section is conducted to support the City of Temple’s expected contributions to the vision expressed in the SHSP as a member of the Killeen Temple Metropolitan Planning Organization (KTMPO), and to support an effective data driven process for prioritizing transportation safety improvements in the region and at the local level. Crash counts and crash rates are examined by individual year in comparison to statewide data and as a 5-year rolling average for comparison to federal FAST Act Roadway Safety Performance Measures (PM1) and Texas statewide safety performance targets.

Crashes by severity are also calculated to examine propensity for harm in the case of a crash, as are types of crashes (opposing direction, same direction, angle, etc.). Vehicle vs. pedestrian and vehcile vs. bicycle crashes are calculated to identify risks to these vulnerable modes. A review of contributing factors was also performed to gain insight on operational vulnerabilities and inform strategy development. Crash hotspots, and top crash intersections and segments are delineated to identify location specific safety needs.

In addition to identifying issues that need to be addressed, the results of this analysis can be used to inform the development of need and purpose for safety strategies and help to improve design elements in future transportation projects, as well as inform the assessment and scoring of proposed projects by providing data-driven benchmarks for safety performance measures. Reviewing operational safety patterns in comparison to other existing conditions analyses such as traffic and transportation demand also provides the City of Temple with a benchmark and tools to assess and compare progress in contributing to PM1 statewide targets as well as gauge progress towards improving transportation safety at the local level.

Methodology

Data Sources

The data used in this analysis was obtained from the Crash Records Information System (CRIS) and covers the most recent five year period (2016-2020) of data available. CRIS is maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and is a georeferenced database that contains a collection of records regarding motor vehicle traffic crashes as submitted by law enforcement officers through a standardized crash report. 2 These reports are processed to exclude personal information but include other crash details relevant to analysis, such as:

• Crash severity • Contributing factors • Location

The summaries and figures in this analysis provide illustrations to better understand regional crash trends in the study area, including:

• Total crashes • Crashes by severity • Crash rates • Crashes involving pedestrians or bicyclists (active transportation crashes)

Data obtained from CRIS was queried for all of Bell County at the crash, unit, and person level in order to support the review of various integral statistics used in roadway safety analysis. The data was processed in Microsoft excel to create summary tables of various statistics. Geographic Information System (GIS) programs were used to geocode the data, refine available data to calculate metrics for the Temple MMP study area, review locations, generate heatmaps to review density, and generate figures to illustrate the analysis in the following sections.

Control sections and roadway centerlines with estimates of vehicle miles traveled were obtained from TxDOT’s open GIS portal.3

In the City of Temple and the surrounding ETJ there were a total of 9,001 crashes between 2016 and 2020 as represented in the CRIS data. Of these crashes 63 were fatal crashes, 212 resulted in suspected serious injury, 1,226 were reported as suspected minor injury, 1,541 as possible injury, 5,590 no injury or property damage only crahses, and 369 crashes reported with unkown severity.

Figure 20 represents these findings by year and shows an overall downward trend in total crashes over the last five years.