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Inconsistent safety rules plague highway work zones

Date Posted: April 16 2010

Traditionally, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) kicks off the summer construction and repair season in April with a week to alert drivers to the dangers of highway work zones. This year, it is the FHWA and state transportation officials who are on notice.

Last December ’s critique in the New York Times – “Efforts Lag to Improve Safety at Work Zones” – hangs over this construction season like the steroid issue in baseball: regulatory failures were alleged; now, a closer examination is likely.

The Times aggregated data from the past five years to point out that more than two Americans a day are killed in work zone tragedies. More than 100 each day are injured. Most of these are the drivers and passengers who crash into or around work zones. About 13.5 percent of the fatalities – 630 since 2004 – are highway construction workers, about 40 percent laborers. Clearly, LIUNA members have a stake in this issue.

Despite the FHWA’s annual appeals to motorists to drive more carefully through work zones, the proportion of total highway fatalities associated with work zones more than doubled between 1982 and 2002 and, despite some recent decline, remains historically high today. The FHWA’s appeals are augmented by state and local public service campaigns, increased fines for speeding in work zones and strengthened police enforcement, but, taken as a whole, these efforts are not succeeding.

The LHSFNA and other worker safety organizations have focused their primary attention on measures that contractors and workers can take to limit fatalities caused, not by crashing motorists, but by construction equipment and other hazards within work zones. While such efforts must continue, the Times piece suggests that state and federal officials could do more to mitigate overall fatalities through strengthened oversight.

Certainly, many work zone management issues are best handled by local contractors under state supervision, but it is a fact that many situations and settings (most obviously, interstate highways) are consistent across state lines. Yet, state transportation officials have generally opposed increased federal oversight, and FHWA has usually deferred by issuing rules that grant maximum state flexibility.

For instance, the FHWA requires states to conduct periodic reviews of their work zone procedures, but such reviews are inadequate, according to a 2004 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report that recommended stronger federal “participation in the states’ work zone safety inspections” and more diligent monitoring of inspection results. Nevertheless, since the NTSB report was issued, FHWA has increased from one to two years the time between required state reviews and ended the requirement of states to share their findings.

Another issue with state inspections is the increasing use of private consultants – rather than state inspectors – to ensure compliance. Mirroring practice that has become commonplace in many sectors of the economy, an increasing proportion of these consultants are former employees of the industry they now inspect. Questions have been raised about their independence and judgment, yet given the current squeeze on state budgets, a return to state inspectors is unlikely.

A final concern raised by the Times investigation is the lack of reliable data on work zone fatalities. While federal data indicate a decline in such deaths in recent years, the newspaper found more than 50 news accounts in the last two years of work zone-related deaths that were not reported in federal data.

“Training and regulation are two major prongs of work zone safety management,” says LIUNA General Secretary Treasurer and LHSFNA Labor Co-Chairman Armand E. Sabitoni, “but without proper oversight and enforcement, their impact is limited. The Federal Highway Administration needs to step up efforts to ensure proper state oversight of work zones. It’s in the best interest of our members as well as the driving public.”

The New York Times article cited several fixable problem areas for safety in work zones. Included were smoothing or eliminating drop-offs where new pavement meets old. Employing warning flaggers who concentrate on their jobs. Providing better warnings of upcoming work zones. Requiring states to share information on how to improve safety.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

*“Yet while federal regulators carefully track the ways motorists cause accidents, they do not make the same attempt to determine when contractors and state highway planners are at fault, and as a result, work-zone crashes are often under-reported or inaccurately reported. That task is left mostly to the imperfect forum of civil courts, where cases are often settled in secret and where important revelations about unsafe construction practices remain unseen and unheeded.

“…There are virtually no laws or regulations mandating safety measures in work zones. There are standards, but they are loosely enforced and differ from state to state. As a result, there are few penalties levied against contractors when, because of ignorance, carelessness or a desire to save money, guidelines are violated. Problem contractors often just keep on getting hired, and dangerous practices remain uncorrected, sometimes for years.

*”In the absence of laws or firm regulations, the states rely primarily on a set of guidelines and standards, many of them codified in the federal highway agency’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices – the bible of traffic safety for road builders. States are required to adopt it, or their own comparable manual, for all federally financed projects.

“But most of what the manual says about work-zone safety is neither mandatory nor specific. For example, it dictates the shape and content of warning signs, but leaves the decision on when and where to place them to project planners. The same is true for deciding how to close lanes, when to use different types of barricades and how to train workers responsible for traffic control.

“The states, acting through the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, have worked to keep it that way. Hard and fast requirements, they argue, would raise costs and increase liability. Highway engineers also say that because no two zones are the same, a cookie-cutter approach would never work.”