Institute for Transportation

The Institute for Transportation at Iowa State University, together with several partner organizations, announces the development of a new National Center for Rural Road Safety.

Funded by a four-year, $4.8 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration and partner support, the center will offer training, technical support, and information to transportation practitioners around the country. The ultimate goal is to help them reduce serious injuries and fatalities on the roads they manage.

The center’s programs will target transportation practitioners in rural road agencies, which manage 80 percent of the surface road network in the U.S. Drivers on these roads face a disproportionate share of safety risks, including 55 percent of roadway fatalities, high rates of crashes in which vehicles go off the road, as well as emergency response times that are 50 percent longer than those in urban/suburban areas.

The center will work closely with local technical assistance programs in Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, and New Jersey.

“We have built a solid public-private partnership that has developed and delivered innovative transportation training to a broad range of agencies, including local, state and tribal,” said Keith Knapp, director of the Iowa Local Technical Assistance Program at the Institute for Transportation. “We will also have the geographic coverage across the U.S. as team members to efficiently address safety training and technical assistance needs on a regional basis.”

The National Center for Rural Road Safety will be housed and led by the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University. Other partners include the Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation at Rutgers University, Cambridge Systematics, Inc., the IDT Group, and the Four Corners Tribal Technical Assistance Center.

For more information, contact Keith Knapp, 515-294-8817, kknapp@iastate.edu.