Crash Avoidance Performance History (CAPH): Safety Performance Measures for UDOT Regions & Divisions
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Summary
This report introduces the Crash Avoidance Performance History (CAPH) initiative, developed for the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) to formalize the measurement of safety impacts across various operational programs. The primary motivation addresses a gap in UDOT’s management practices: while many regional and divisional functions—such as snow removal, deer fencing, and pavement maintenance—significantly influence highway safety, their effectiveness had not been consistently or formally measured. CAPH aims to provide specific performance measures for these programs, enabling managers to make data-driven decisions to improve safety outcomes. The methodology relies on the existing Crash Data Delivery System, a software tool developed through prior research that allows rapid internet-based download and visualization of accident data. The system supports multiple analysis types, including project-level evaluations for specific corridors and program-level analyses for system-wide trends. It utilizes eleven years of crash data coded by accident, vehicle, and person factors, allowing for simple, advanced, fixed-segment, floating-segment, and cluster analyses. The report outlines recommended performance measures for eight key programs, such as snow and ice removal, deer fence maintenance, truck brake failures, and construction zone accidents. These measures track metrics like crash clusters, severity rates, and specific incident types to guide corrective actions, such as modifying traffic control plans or adjusting maintenance schedules. The findings highlight significant potential benefits from implementing CAPH. User estimates suggest that applying crash data to refine these eight programs could reduce the total number of accidents in Utah by approximately 1,000 per year, prevent about 80 injuries, and save roughly three lives annually. This translates to an estimated societal benefit of $15.8 to $30.2 million per year. The report details a benefit-cost ratio of 51 to 98 over ten years, with annual program costs estimated at $300,000 for support and $79,000 for research. Specific program analyses indicate varying reduction potentials; for example, deer fence maintenance could reduce crashes by 15–25%, while slippery pavement evaluations might yield a 10–15% reduction. The significance of this work lies in its integration of safety performance metrics into standard employee performance plans and operational decision-making. By providing a structured framework for analyzing crash histories, CAPH encourages a more productive and efficient use of UDOT manpower. The report recommends that managers share experiences across regions, refine performance measures over time based on statistical validity, and record program successes and shortcomings. Ultimately, CAPH shifts safety from a passive outcome to an actively managed component of transportation infrastructure maintenance and planning.
Key finding
Implementing CAPH safety measures across eight UDOT programs is estimated to reduce total accidents by approximately 1,000 per year, preventing 80 injuries and 3 fatalities, with annual societal benefits valued at $15.8 to $30.2 million.
Methodology
dataset
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via bulk_ingest_rosap on 2026-05-23 (6 acquisition events logged).
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | rosap | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-23 |
| archive | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-23 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| chunk | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| embed | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-02 |
| enrich | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-23 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-23 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 19 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
- incidence prevalence
- naturalistic crash near crash
- crash typology
- comparative international
- causation analyses
- regulatory evaluation
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Applied Guidance: countermeasure evaluation
- Empirical Findings: crash risk outcomes
- Methodological Resource: dataset resource