Head-On Collisions

Introduction

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Strategic Highway Safety Plan identified 22 goals to pursue in order to reduce highway crash fatalities. Goal 15 is "keeping vehicles on the roadway," Goal 16 is "minimizing the consequences of leaving the road," and Goal 18 is "reducing head-on and across-median crashes." These three goals are addressed by three emphasis areas:

• Run-off-road (ROR) crashes,
• Head-on crashes, and
• Trees in hazardous locations.

The common solution to these goals and emphasis areas is to keep the vehicle in the proper lane. While this may not eliminate crashes with other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, and trains, it would eliminate many fatalities that result when a vehicle strays from its lane onto the roadside or into oncoming traffic.

This emphasis area addresses head-on crashes associated with highway (i.e., nonintersection) segments. A head-on crash typically occurs when a vehicle crosses a centerline or a median and crashes into an approaching vehicle. It can also occur when a driver knowingly or unknowingly travels the wrong way in a traffic lane. Head-on crashes occur as a result of a driver's inadvertent actions—as with ROR encroachments—or deliberate actions—e.g., executing a passing maneuver on a two-lane road.

One of the hallmarks of the AASHTO Strategic Highway Safety Plan is to approach safety problems in a comprehensive manner, both in the range of strategies and in the related emphasis areas. The range of strategies available in the guides will ultimately cover various aspects of the road user, the highway, the vehicle, the environment, and the management system. The guides strongly encourage the user to develop a program to tackle a particular emphasis area from each of these perspectives and in a coordinated manner.

The goal is to move away from independent activities of engineers, law enforcement, educators, judges, and other highway safety specialists to cooperative efforts. The implementation process outlined in the guides promotes the formation of working groups and alliances that represent all of the elements of the safety system. In this formation, highway safety specialists can draw upon their combined expertise to reach the bottom-line goal of targeted reduction of crashes and fatalities associated with a particular emphasis area.