The American Transportation Research Institute, as part of its recent update showing trends in crashes and violations — with a goal of showing what violations are most associated with crashes and could be utilized in predictive modeling — ranked state enforcement departments on the effectiveness of their truck-enforcement units, based on ATRI’s estimation of their traffic-enforcement activities. Traffic-enforcement-associated roadside inspections are assumed generally to target observed unsafe behaviors that are most closely associated with future crash risk in this and other analyses.
The rankings, part of the Predicting Truck Crash Involvement update, show a bevy of states that consistently rank high in a variety of Overdrive‘s own category rankings of state departments in a variety of metrics.
This table from the organization’s report shows ATRI’s updated top-states rankings — all but one state, Illinois, was part of the top states list the last time the analysis was updated in 2011. Indiana, with its outsize focus on traffic enforcement as a percentage of total inspections, led the way. Interested parties can download ATRI’s full report, outlining a variety of violations and their relative association (or lack thereof) with the occurrence of crashes, and full rankings of state departments among other research, via this link.As noted in the report, the rankings above are based on the percentage of traffic enforcement inspections conducted by each state (computed as a share of the total nationwide) minus the percentage of crashes involving large trucks in the state. The lower the total, with negative numbers resulting in states where the traffic-enforcement inspection percentage is a good deal higher than the reportable crash-occurrence percentage, the higher the ranking in ATRI’s analysis.
“This performance metric assumes that there is a relationship between CMV enforcement and crash occurrence,” study authors note.
Many of the institute’s top-ten states have been the subject of Overdrive CSA’s Data Trail analyses in years past. Find links to coverage of those departments below, and stay tuned this month for the 2018 CSA’s Data Trail principal update, also in the August print issue, and more individual-state enforcement priorities profiles in the months that follow.
