Summary of Treatments for Crashes on Rural Two-Lane Highways in Texas

The majority of the highway system in Texas, as well as in the United States, consists of two and three-lane rural roads. Specifically, the state of Texas maintains nearly 80,000 centerline-miles of paved roadways serving about 400 million vehicle miles per day. Due to the low volume and relatively low crash frequency on many rural roads, it is often not cost-effective to upgrade the roads. However, vehicles traveling on these roadways generally have high speeds and, thus, tend to have relatively more severe injuries when vehicle crashes do occur. To address these concerns, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) sponsored Project 0-4048 with the following objectives: * Identify common types of crashes on rural, low-volume roadways (average daily traffic less than 2000). * Identify potential low-cost safety improvements for rural Texas roadways. * Investigate the effectiveness of selected safety improvements.