Applying the Safe System Approach to Transportation Planning, Design, and Operations (2025)
Chapter: Focus Groups
Focus Groups
In July 2023, the research team convened a series of five focus groups. Four of the five groups consisted of professionals within the same or similar fields, and the final focus group involved professionals from a diverse set of fields. Based upon their expressed willingness to engage in group discussions—via signing up for the focus groups from the practitioner survey platform—and their stated roles in transportation safety, the team invited a total of 42 professionals to participate and 38—or more than 90 percent of those invited—of them took part in the following focus groups:
- 7-17-23 (Public Health): 8 participants
- 7-19-23 (Planning): 8 participants
- 7-20-23 (Multidisciplinary): 9 participants
- 7-24-23 (Engineering – State DOT): 6 participants
- 7-26-23 (Engineering – Misc): 7 participants
The team stored, shared, managed, and analyzed focus group data in Microsoft Word and NVivo. We employed a codebook thematic analysis approach (e.g., see: Braun & Clarke, 2021) to guide our coding of focus group participants’ contributions. Trained coders read focus group transcripts and watched recordings of focus group proceedings to discern codes—i.e., brief, illustrative descriptions of textual data (e.g., speed limiting priority). The coders then shared and discussed codes, arriving at a consensus of how to apply additional codes and proceed with analyzing transcripts. The next step in the process involved analyzing developed codes and categorizing them into broader, encompassing themes, ones that would depict patterns observed across codes and focus group discussions. Finally, the team refined the codes and themes iteratively, until all team members agreed with the final analysis.
The team identified five themes from the data to that provide insight into how the United States. might transition to a truly Safe System, as well as how we can articulate and overcome barriers to change: (1) Collaborate and coordinate across sectors, disciplines, municipalities, and community members; (2) Challenge perceptions that speed management impinge on personal freedoms; (3) Streamline, simplify, and enhance access to safety funding; (4) Advance proactive safety policies and practices, ones that respond to current and future realities; and (5) Start small, build support for change, and approach safety differently.
Table 18. Focus group questions and purposes.
| Question Purpose | Question |
|---|---|
| Opening | What does the term “Safe System” mean to you? |
| Professional role reflection | What would you say are the “roles” or specific functions of [participants’ discipline] in creating a Safe System for all road users? |
| Future thinking solicitation | How do you think we could begin transitioning toward a Safe System? |
| Pragmatic solution generation | Here is a safety practice you and your [participants’ discipline] colleagues rated according to its safety impact and its financial, social, and political feasibility. What sorts of barriers or obstacles, if any, do you foresee in implementing this practice? and What kinds of resources (e.g., data, money, skillsets) would be needed to begin implementing this practice? |
| Closing | Have we missed anything? |
Collaborate and coordinate across sectors, disciplines, municipalities, and community members.
There was consensus among participants that transitioning toward a Safe System requires a great deal of cross-sectoral and cross-community coordination, and authentic community engagement.
“…we need better cross-disciplinary collaboration, especially between transportation and injury, prevention / public health professionals. There’s people speaking different languages. and so being able to get those folks on the same page.” Participant 7, FG1
“The lack of collaboration between health care and public health and between the hospitals and law enforcement, those kind of things are problems.” Participant 6, FG1
“They are townships and boroughs and they each have their own set of rules in terms of how they address road improvement and that in it, of itself can be a barrier in terms of prioritizing safety county wide.” Participant 1, FG2
“[Safety] is not only a matter of educating the city professionals, but also those developers to look at the safety effects their development has on the city, and how they can improve their development, so that there is not a safety, concern, or effect that they can have within the city, and I think that education to not to all and everybody that is responsible for land development is important.” Participant 8, FG2
“…we’re trying to do a little more community led work and collaborative work…having a more voice to community, asking more from their observations and input and then helping us then to work with our data and our structure with how we’re working with these communities.” Participant 4, FG1
“I think getting folks to think on the same level about the issues that we know are bigger than what everybody is doing on a day-to-day basis is very important.” Participant 5, FG3
“I found that a lot of developers when you start to explain to them by putting in some of these features into their development plans as they start them out with connections for trails and other attributes it actually helps them in their process to better market their community.” Participant 6, FG3
“Input takes a long time using the public health model, but you need to connect with the community. Ask them what they want, and it takes time. But that’s the best way to avoid the problems that might come up later.” Participant 1, FG3
“It takes awareness of my public that fatalities on the roadway are a problem that everyone shares a role in and everyone shares a solution. It takes a little bit of anger from the electeds, and I think it takes leadership from our department to guide the way.” Participant 3, FG5
“It’s not enough to just strengthen one element and implement treatments. You have to do all of these other things like educating the public on what you’re supposed to do at RRFBs (rectangular rapid flashing beacons), or how you enter roundabouts.” Participant 1, FG5
“that interface between planning and engineering that a community, are setting a goal of what they want our future to look like. And even if they put that in their master plan, does that then make its way into the other engineering decisions and policy decisions?” Participant 6, FG5
“I think that the engineers need to recognize that plans are the will of the community, or there’s at least some people in the community who maybe want that. And so, they should respect that
instead of looking at a manual and telling you, we’re going to decide for you because we’re we think we’re the experts.” Participant 4, FG5
Challenge perceptions that speed management impinge on personal freedoms.
A persistent theme across focus groups involved the need to develop a different social and political relationship with speed management. Many focus group participants attributed the lack of political action on speed management to a fundamental American individualist mindset, one that perceived the managing of travel speeds as an affront to some people’s sense of freedom.
“I think the same challenges we have with like gun policies, and that you can’t control me. This is America. I have the right to do whatever I want to do.” Participant 8, FG1
“But I think the point about personal freedom is a problem, and we’d like to see more automated speed cameras and automated red-light cameras in our state and right now they’re not allowed, and we’re hoping to at least get permission that for them towns can opt in if towns want to put some in place.” Participant 6, FG1
“When we look at these like governing the speed, working with insurance and getting rewards for good behavior and driving within certain speed parameters. Working with the insurance industry to monitor the speeding on apps, on cars, and when drivers don’t exceed speed limits, they get discounts on their insurance.” Participant 8, FG1
“I would start changing speed and speed management. The way we’ve set speed limits has been based on driver preference. The way we design streets has been based on the planned speed limit plus a few miles per hour. We need to see speed as a danger to people. It is what causes death and serious injuries because of physics.” Participant 8, FG3
“[there’s this mindset that] if you are unfortunate enough to be involved in an auto crash or a pedestrian crash that’s on you. Just don’t get in the way of what I want. I think, through all of these discussions that the transportation system is for me and everyone else is secondary.” Participant 3, FG5
“Crashes are pretty rare events, right? I haven’t been involved in one my whole life, and I’ve been driving for x years. So, it’s very easy for people to sort of lull themselves into thinking this is never going to happen to me, because likely it’s probably not, or at least maybe once in your life, or something like that. So it’s hard for people to take into daily accounts something that may very, very rarely or never happen.” Participant 2, FG5
Streamline, simplify, and enhance access to safety funding.
The amount of and access to safety funding riddled many of the focus group discussions. Funding was discussed in the context of specific engineering countermeasures (e.g., roundabouts), as well as the ability to link and integrate crash report and medical data to garner a deeper understanding of crash injury profiles and prognoses.
“It’s very hard to get funding for public health. We’re somehow not able to accept all the Federal dollars. There are too many requirements. There’s too much reporting. There is a barrier to funding, and it seems like the public health departments need to be the ones to link the data,
because we have the legal authority to get the hospital information and the trauma registry information and the ambulance trip information.” Participant 6, FG1
“If the system isn’t safe, if our vulnerable users are in peril, and I think that the mentality of using the funds wisely has to be a little bit more streamlined and so that we, as a city, and whoever wants to use the money that is out there can do so in a way that we allow all our users to be safe.” Participant 8, FG2
“...make it as easy for them [smaller communities] to engage and receive that funding by doing the upfront analysis work, the safe analysis work ahead of time.” Participant 3, FG2
“Money is a big barrier for us. These always pan out to be very, very expensive, but in addition to that, we always get some push back from our freight partners, and so roundabouts have been rather tricky to move forward it takes a lot of coordination, a lot of talking and then agreeing before we actually get started on around about.” Participant 1, FG5
Advance proactive safety policies and practices, ones that respond to current and future realities.
In this wide-ranging theme, focus group participants spoke to their current or desired shifts toward systemic safety analyses, methods of incorporating safety across all project stages, and considering the safety implications of extreme weather effects (e.g., flooding), as well as identifying the lack of political will to support the implementation of Safe System principles and practices.
“We’re trying to get traffic coming measures put in the street. But there’s a policy with our city that says you can’t put traffic calming unless there’s shown to be an issue where there are crashes or near misses. So therefore, no new neighborhood could ever get traffic calming measures.” Participant 7, FG1
“…whatever project we build now is going to have impacts in the future, either in terms of resilience, sustainability, as well as for a system or a roadway to continue being safe, we have to maintain it at a high quality. So high quality materials are important, good maintenance is important.” Participant 8, FG2
“…we’ve done some preliminary studies about how flooding has impacted fatal and serious crashes. I imagine flooding could be an issue in the future. But something that we must do has to do with the element of post-crash, care. And if we have flooding or something that is impacting navigation to hospitals, we have a lot of scenarios that we can’t plan for yet.” Participant 4, FG2
“It’s trying to make sure that we have that safety conversation on all of our projects, not just the safety specific ones.” Participant 2, FG4
“…we’re finding that there’s other tools or enhancements that we can start that may have started as a hotspot that we can start implementing in a systemic way because of how successful we’re seeing the localized data while those hotspots have been implemented, or several of those hotspots have been implemented for several years.” Participant 3, FG4
“We noticed that we were under invested in roadway departure and bicycle and pedestrian right way to per term pedestrian safety improvements. We developed a systemic safety application program, where we are spending about 50 million dollars a year on proactive safety treatments that prevent roadway departure or pedestrian, related crashes.” Participant 1, FG4
“Using a really comprehensive database, that both all state agencies, law enforcement and local governments can have access to with really detailed information really helps people quickly home in when they’re starting a project on what their real problems are rather than maybe the problems that they perceive or the problems that they’re hearing about.” Participant 6, FG4
“Federal highway has clearly laid out safe vehicles, safe speeds and roads, safe users. But the underlying policies and laws don’t currently reinforce that.” Participant 6, FG5
“We can come up with solutions, but if the political will isn’t going to support you, or leadership isn’t going to support those solutions, then then it’s going to go nowhere.” Participant 7, FG5
Start small, build support for change, and approach safety differently.
Many participants evoked concepts of experimentation, iteration, granting municipalities greater local control over speed limit setting, and approaching persistent and emerging safety problems using different thinking and tools within this theme.
“…one block at a time, one street at a time. Starting at these projects out in getting people familiar with them, whether it’s a new bike lane or a pedestrian improvement, or something like that, you know, once people start seeing these and experiencing them that can very, very slowly and incrementally start to potentially change their minds.” Participant 3, FG3
“The thing we can do today is just make it really clear how far we have to go and kind of the breath of action needed and the depth of action needed. And then it’s not going to be doing what we’ve done for the last several decades more. It’s going to be doing different things to reach that Safe System.” Participant 8, FG3
“…change the policies that will allow for I think more local control in terms of setting speed limits beyond the 85th percentile.” Participant 9, FG3
“We need to think of starting with our most vulnerable little ones and designing to make it more welcoming, not less welcoming. So, if we tried to get the public to shift from going fast, fast, faster, to my destination, okay. If it were my child, would I want them walking on this road?” Participant 1, FG3
“We’ve been looking hard at the systemic way towards safety on trying to expedite some high-level data, to then utilize that as the driving force towards making changes across the board.” Participant 3, FG4
“I’ve found a lot of success with seasonal school zones and for areas that have high fluctuations in population. And for [state name], it’s our tourism season, it’s been very successful to implement reduced speed zones in in high in peak tourism, because it’s so congested. People are going slow, anyway, so you’re not really stealing away anything from anybody and eventually it gets adopted so that the people who live there year-round like the concept so much that they asked for it to become year-round.” Participant 6, FG4
“This is where [self-explaining road designs] we like to do little pilots where we test some stuff out and you’re not throwing everything into it. You’re going to prove it first, and then if it’s successful, you can expand from there.” Participant 1, FG4
