Meetings with experts in each country were designed to address one or all of these four focus areas, and the scanning study's goal was to identify safety policies, programs, and practices from each country that helped reduce roadway fatalities and injuries. The scanning team evaluated the possibility of implementing the European approaches and measures observed. Significant findings and commonalities among the countries are documented in this report. During the study, team members met with a diverse set of representatives from national transportation administrations and ministries, state departments of transportation, university faculty, research organizations, and nongovernmental organizations.

Key findings of the scanning study of each country are described in Chapter Two and the common themes found in these highly effective safety programs are discussed in Chapter Three. Chapter Four summarizes the recommendations and implementation strategies the scanning team proposes.

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STUDY ORGANIZATION

The scanning team conducted its study of managing and organizing comprehensive highway safety in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom from March 1 to 17, 2002. Primary contacts in these countries are listed in Appendix A. The countries and dates they were visited are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Safety scan countries and dates visited.

Country	Dates of Visit
Sweden	March 2-5, 2002
Germany	March 6-9, 2002
The Netherlands	March 10-12, 2002
The United Kingdom	March 13-17, 2002

The team chose these countries because of their recent highway fatality reductions, past highway safety records and experience, and international reputation for cooperation and coordination in highway safety programming. Table 2, adapted from a German summary of highway fatalities in Europe and the United States, shows crash statistics and population of each country visited and the United States.(1)
The size of the countries visited during the study varied considerably. Sweden is a little larger than California in land area and had an estimated July 1998 population of 8.9 million (1/30 of the U.S. population). Similarly, Germany is slightly smaller than Montana and had an estimated July 2000 population of 82.8 million (1/3 of the U.S. population). The Netherlands is about twice the size of New Jersey and had a July 2000 population of about 15.9 million (1/20 of the U.S. population). Finally, the United Kingdom is slightly smaller in land area than Oregon and had a July 2000 population of about 59.5 million (1/5 of the U.S. population).

Table 2. Scanning study country 1999 safety statistics.

Measure	Germany	The Netherlands	Sweden	United Kingdom	United States
Population (millions)	82.8	15.9	8.9	59.5	272.7
Public Road Network (1,000 Miles)	388.2	72.2	130.2	244.4 (a)	3,908.6
Total Annual Fatalities	7,772	1,090	580	3,564	41,611
Fatalities per 100,000 People	9.5	6.9	6.6	6.0	15.3
Fatalities per Billion Vehicle-Miles	19.7	15.0 (b)	13.4	13.1 (a)	15.5

(a) Data from 1997 (b) Data from 1998

Table 2 also shows that highway fatality rates per 100,000 population in the four countries the scanning team visited were 40 to 60 percent of the rate found in the United States. Fatality rates per billion vehicle-miles traveled, however, were 84 to 97 percent of the U.S. rate in three of the countries visited. The German rate was higher than the U.S. rate.

The scanning team also held three internal organizational meetings during the study. The team met March 3, 2002, to organize the study, emphasize its purpose, assign note-recording requirements, and identify team members' primary interests. The team held a mid-study meeting March 10 to review primary findings and common themes for the first two countries visited, discuss the remainder of the study, and reiterate its purpose. The team met March 16 to review key findings from the final two countries, determine common policy and themes in each of the four countries, develop preliminary recommendations and a final report outline, and organize a strategy implementation team.

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PANEL COMPOSITION

FHWA and AASHTO sponsored the scanning study, which was organized by American Trade Initiatives, Inc. The study was scheduled initially for September 2001, but was rescheduled for March 2002 after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The rescheduling required replacement of some team members.

Team members were selected to represent the diversity of professionals involved in highway safety. The 11-member team included representatives from FHWA, two universities, five State DOTs, and a non-profit private research organization. The team included engineers, a State patrol superintendent, and a governor’s highway safety bureau representative. Team members’ safety expertise included roadway design, enforcement measures, educational programs, research, and technology transfer. Team members and their representative organizations are shown in Table 3. Contact information information and biographic sketches for each member are included in Appendix B.

Table 3. Team members and organizations.

Dwight Bower Idaho Department of Transportation	Douglas Harwood Midwest Research Institute
John Baxter FHWA Indiana Division	Keith Knapp University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mike Crow Kansas Department of Transportation	George “Ed” Rice, Jr. Florida Department of Transportation
Troy Costales Oregon Department of Transportation	Douglas Van Buren Wisconsin Department of Transportation
Michael Griffith FHWA Office of Safety Research and Development	Eugene Wilson University of Wyoming
Michael Halladay FHWA Office of Safety

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AMPLIFYING QUESTIONS

The scanning team developed a series of amplifying questions to help focus the discussion with European safety experts and show them what subjects, topics, and issues were of interest. They included investigation of national safety goals and plans; decision-making and management processes, policies and procedures; resources, analytical tools, and legislative policies; and examples and results of good and poor safety improvements. The questions provided to the European hosts before the scanning study are included in Appendix C.

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