January/February 2003
Pushing through the Safety Plateau
by Kristine Lee Leiphart
To decrease fatalities, workforce skills must develop and adapt
to new and changing transportation safety needs.
About 10 years ago, our Nation's highway fatality numbers reached
a plateau (between 39,000 and 42,000) and have remained static since
then. To restore progress in highway safety, the transportation community
needs to find new, cost-effective countermeasures that can be implemented
in a timely manner. The development of these safety measures should
include an awareness of needs in different localities and functional
road classes.
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Snowplow operators help improve roadway safety for motorists
traveling in winter weather conditions.
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After development, the innovations must reach the transportation
professionals, who can implement and use them to break through the
safety plateau. This "technology transfer" contains an important component—communication—the
act of providing transportation professionals with safety knowledge
updates.
However, innovative ideas and emerging technologies are useful only
to the extent that people apply the research findings. New technologies
usually call for a change in skill sets to implement them properly.
In this light, education, training, and professional development opportunities
are key ways to maintain a well-equipped, knowledgeable workforce.
Training fosters comfort with the newest technological advances and
helps employees apply the innovations in their daily jobs.
In the President's Management Agenda, launched in 2001, President
George W. Bush stated, "In most agencies, human resources planning
is weak. Workforce deficiencies will be exacerbated by the upcoming
retirement wave of the baby-boom generation."
To ensure that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has a skilled
workforce to carry out safety functions that change with new technology,
research concepts, and legislative mandates, FHWA's Office of Safety
initiated a program called Professional Excellence for Highway Safety
Program (PE-SHP). The new program, which started in 2001, is designed
to facilitate information-sharing among transportation safety experts
for their professional development and to enhance their job performance.
The communication of ideas among the transportation safety community
is accomplished through workshops, shared databases, and reference
materials.
First Steps
A workforce development program encompasses activities that range
from professional development to management of the labor force. Traditionally,
workforce development involved identifying available staffing resources;
projecting employee recruitment, retention, and retirement; preparing
succession planning; ensuring that staff members have adequate resources
and training; and matching the demand and supply of human capital
(i.e., employee knowledge and existing and potential skills) to close
the gap between future staff needs and present availability. Workforce
development integration into an agency's strategic planning process
can identify the number of individuals needed to staff various professional
levels in an agency and determine present and future capabilities
that an agency will need to reach long-term goals. This formal process
helps match each employee's knowledge and experience with the programmatic
and performance needs and projections of an organization.
Creating a comprehensive, transportation workforce program is a long-term
goal. It requires research and development (R&D) of new tools
that are necessary for transportation engineers, planners, and researchers
to improve their job performances. R&D requires that: (1) there
are practical applications for the research, and (2) the findings
can be deployed to the transportation workforce in a timely manner.
Prompt but well-designed deployment is essential to reap the benefits
of R&D investments, and now is the time to invest for the future—before
the transportation community lags behind or loses critical workforce
knowledge.
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Percentage of USDOT Employees by Age Groups.
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Percentage of Retirement Eligibles at USDOT.
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Demand and Supply
Approximately 71 percent of the Federal government's current permanent
employees will be eligible for regular or early retirement by 2010.
Similarly, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, the
public policy research arm of the State University of New York, estimates
that in the next 15 years, 40 percent of State and local government
employees will be eligible for retirement.
Among various U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) offices,
a large percentage of employees are nearing the retirement age categories.
This trend is expected to lead to a large turnover, which will increase
training needs within a short period of time. FHWA's workforce retirement
turnover will be a relatively staggered and gradual process.
The percentage of employees projected to be eligible for retirement
from USDOT increased from fiscal year 2000 to 2001. According to a
study conducted by the Office of the Secretary at USDOT, in FHWA,
the retirement eligibles were projected to be 12.3 percent for 2000
and 24.9 percent for 2001. For the Federal Transit Administration
(FTA), it was 12.9 in 2000 and 31.5 in 2001, and similarly, for the
Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), 11.1 percent in 2000 and 27.7
in 2004.
The Federal government is using innovative recruitment and retention
policies to attract and retain quality employees and maintain a quality
work environment. USDOT's recruitment practices are comparable to
the best practices of other major agencies. For the most part, the
agencies within USDOT, including FHWA, have maintained consistent
levels of hiring, with a slight increase from 8.3 percent in fiscal
year 2000 to 11.2 percent in fiscal year 2001.
Various agencies within USDOT have had varying degrees of success
in retaining experienced personnel, thus minimizing the cost of training
and maximizing employee efficiency. Succession planning is being reviewed
at FHWA because a higher rate of loss is expected for its most experienced
and technical staff.
Along with integrating performance measures, improving financial
management, using e-government initiatives, and employing outsourcing
techniques to keep government accountable to the customers, managing
human capital efficiently is a key factor in ensuring that any transportation
agency will have quality programs and customer satisfaction. This
concept of efficiency in the workforce will be especially important
in the Federal government as the flux of people retiring from the
public sector escalates in the next decade.
Training as a Workforce Strategy
A key way to use human capital more efficiently is training and continuing
education to convey information about new findings.
Training helps increase the number of professionals who are able
to educate the public about transportation topics. Educated professionals
can help people of all ages understand, process, and retain the concept
of the value of transportation. The transportation community can continue
to contribute to sustaining an efficient transportation system by
communicating that safer roads help save lives and reduce societal
costs from crashes.
Although administrative duties often require staff members in an
agency to concentrate on short-term deliverables, the organization's
business plan focuses on sustaining and implementing a long-term vision.
Training and education have an important role in showing that the
agency is making investments in the people who largely determine how
the organization will perform and function in the long run.
Planning the safety workforce is a process in evolution.
Managing Human Capital
Any organization or company has tangible resources (financial resources,
capital assets) and intangible resources (human capital and brand
recognition). In the case of private industry, the intangible resources
can offer a competitive advantage since they are unique to that company
and are not easily reproducible. In the public sector, like the private
sector, performance can be linked directly to the quality of the organization's
human capital. Some companies even strategize their future programs
around their staff members' backgrounds and interests.
From time to time, staff members need renewed training so that they
can develop fresh ideas. A gap remains between what transportation
professionals learn from the transportation curricula during their
college years and what they are expected to do on the job. Even among
safety professionals who have been in the field for a number of years,
many opportunities for training still exist. Logically, there should
be no disconnect between the two knowledge transfer techniques: the
one that is gained by attending training and the other that is attained
by performing on-the-job duties.
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The roadway workforce needs adequate training on how to conduct
vehicle inspections on tank trucks such as this one.
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Continuing education courses often differ from traditional college
courses because they are designed to offer knowledge that is immediately
applicable by the working professional. Additionally, adults have
a different learning technique than college students in that they
prefer more interactive learning than occurs in classroom lectures.
University courses therefore may not be suitable for the adult learner.
On the other hand, the content of a continuing education course may
lack the substantive rigor found in university courses. In a training
course, participants are expected to take the fundamental knowledge
attained from the adult learning course and then to seek out further
knowledge on their own. Ideally, the result is that the transportation
professionals can carry out their duties more efficiently and effectively
because they are using newly acquired knowledge and a scientific process
to arrive at decisions related to a specific assignment.
Training Courses
In order to raise safety awareness and offer continuous education
for highway safety professionals, FHWA has developed new training
courses and is enhancing existing courses. A new course, Introduction
to Improving Highway Safety, will focus on using network screening,
identifying high-crash locations, and conducting data analysis. Safety
professionals will be able to establish baseline crash statistics
for areas with the highest number of injuries and fatalities. The
course also will explain the regulatory requirements of the Highway
Safety Improvement Program (HSIP), which provides funds to States
in order to make safety enhancements. Ken Epstein of FHWA's Office
of Safety and Mike Griffith at FHWA's Turner-Fairbank Highway Research
Center (TFHRC) are developing this HSIP course.
In 2002, FHWA produced a safety module to give new employees an overview
of FHWA's safety programs. Peter Eun, Emmett McDevitt, and Tom Breslin
at FHWA's Division Offices, in collaboration with FHWA's Office of
Human Resources, developed this training course.
Matt Lister and Pete Rusch at FHWA's Resource Center in the Midwest,
with Keith Gates at FHWA in Washington, DC, created a workshop that
integrates safety with intelligent transportation systems (ITS), titled
"Improving Highway Safety with ITS." The workshop explores the latest
technological options available to enhance roadway safety, such as
technologies related to weather, lighting, road designs, signs, and
intelligent vehicle initiatives. The workshop compares technology-centered
safety solutions to traditional safety enhancements such as rumble
strips and guardrails.
Other training courses already exist or are in development by FHWA.
For example, a Roadway Safety Audit course examines future and existing
roads. The audits, adaptable to local needs and concerns, are a preventive
tool that can raise safety consciousness and enhance the safety practices
of State and local transportation agencies.
Another FHWA existing course, the University Course on Pedestrian
and Bicyclist Facility Design, is intended for use in undergraduate-
or graduate-level transportation planning and design curricula at
universities and related institutions. The course provides current
information on pedestrian and bicycle planning and design techniques,
as well as practical lessons on how to increase bicycling and walking
through land-use practices and engineering design. Developed in coordination
with professors, the course is designed to be modular so that faculty
members can teach it as a complete full-semester course, in segments,
or as topics extracted to incorporate into their own courses. FHWA
also received input from industry and State and local jurisdictions.
A work zone safety course currently under development will cover
meeting the customers' needs for mobility and safety during construction
and maintenance operations. Another course being developed recognizes
the use of retroreflectivity—the visibility of signs and pavement
markings—as an essential element for efficient traffic flow and
highway safety. The course will address the evaluation of retro-reflectometer
equipment for measuring the nighttime visibility of signs and pavement
markings. The course also will cover how to determine when signs and
pavement markings have reached the end of their useful life and need
to be refurbished.
Safety Workforce Planning Workshop
To better gauge the professional development and training needs of
FHWA's customers, the agency sponsored a Safety Workforce Planning
Workshop in San Antonio, TX, on April 3-4, 2002. Cosponsors included
the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), the American Association
of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), and the Transportation
Research Board (TRB). The workshop participants—representatives
of organizations in the highway safety community—assessed the
needs of the safety workforce and discussed steps that could be taken
to ensure transportation agencies have a capable workforce to meet
future needs.
The goal was to derive policy recommendations that would help enhance
highway safety training and workforce development. The workshop attendees
recommended that the enforcement, engineering, education, and emergency
medical services communities be involved in safety education and awareness
outreach. Other specific policy recommendations drafted by the workshop
participants included developing safety training programs and a comprehensive
plan to prepare the workforce for their roles and responsibilities,
establishing and funding a road safety curriculum, and developing
safety training that is performance-driven. The attendees suggested
a central source for housing all training information. The participants
also recommended measuring the success of safety training by instituting
performance evaluations of safety professionals and by measuring reductions
in fatalities, injuries, and crashes.
The participants recommended that FHWA establish a comprehensive
system of quality safety training that (1) includes a clearinghouse
for training in the "Four Es" (engineering, education, enforcement,
and emergency response); (2) assures the quality integration, timeliness,
and appropriateness of the training; and (3) ensures integration of
safety in related disciplines.
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A new FHWA course will offer training on measuring the nighttime
visibility of traffic signs such as this one.
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Future Steps
The next steps for institutional consideration and implementation
include encouraging integration of highway safety courses in transportation
and civil engineering curricula at universities; integrating planning,
engineering, design, operations, and training efforts necessary for
highway safety; and exploring the technology, data, analysis, and
evaluation needs for enhanced safety.
To help further training, education, and workforce development in
areas such as highway safety, FHWA and USDOT have been expanding partnerships
that are internal and external to the agency. FHWA continues to work
with organizations such as AASHTO, TRB, and ITE to integrate safety
with its organizational strategies. In an environment that supports
a performance culture, the use of human capital is an area that can
help government reduce costs and be able to do more with fewer resources.