Kevin Elliott 0:05 Kevin, welcome to home safely, a podcast from the National Center for rural road safety. Hi everyone. I'm Kevin Elliott. I'm your host on the podcast, and I'm the marketing manager for the National Center for rural road safety. Each episode on our podcast will bring you stories, strategies and solutions that are helping communities across the country make their roads safer for everyone, whether you're behind the wheel, designing the road, or just a community member, we're all working together out there to get everyone home safely. Enjoy the episode. We are here in our very first episode of our podcast. We're super excited, and so we thought as our very first guest, the most appropriate guest would be the director of the National Center for rural road safety, Jamie Sullivan. We thought she'd be a great spokesperson and to kind of set the stage for what the Safety Center is and what we're all about and the point of this podcast. And so I'm really, really excited to have Jamie on. She and I have worked together now for, oh, shoot, lots of years, and we love working at the center and the work it does. So Jamie, thank you for being our very first guest on what I'm sure is going to be a worldwide sensation of a podcast. Jamie Sullivan 1:21 Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be our first guest. I'm excited for us to start this podcast, and excited for the amount of information that we can get out to our audience using this particular format. Kevin Elliott 1:36 Yeah, it's a the center is a pretty special place. So we'll start at the top, right there. It's like if nobody, if people have never, heard of the National Center for rural road safety, what would you tell them we do there? Jamie Sullivan 1:51 Well, we love to say that we're the Rural Road Safety hub, and what we do is really focus on training and technical assistance for practitioners of all kinds who deal with transportation, and we really like to create and celebrate and support our rural champions out there on the roads who are aiming to make the US roads more safe. Kevin Elliott 2:13 Okay, so here's the thing, that when I came into this world and I started learning about rural road safety, one of the big shockers to me was that basically in every state in the union, or certainly most of them, a really big portion of their fatal and serious crashes happen on rural roads. Maybe let's talk a little bit about how big a problem this is nationally, because most people don't see it right, because the rural areas are so far flung and they don't get the news coverage, and it's not like some big pile up in the middle of Chicago or something in aggregate, this is a huge problem, isn't Jamie Sullivan 2:48 it? It is a really huge problem. There's about one and a half times higher of a fatality rate in rural areas than in urban areas, and when we look at it by percentage, it's a little bit lower in rural areas than urban about 41% of our fatalities in 2022 happened in rural areas. But when we look at it with all of the other information, 20% of the US population living in rural areas, 32% of our total vehicle miles traveled in rural areas, and 68% of the public road miles existing in rural areas. That's a huge number. And the most important thing, I think, for us to realize is that while I just gave you a whole list of statistics, statistics are not the real thing that we're looking at here. Each of those numbers is a person. They have a name, a family, a lot of friends, and that number really should be zero. Kevin Elliott 3:46 Not only do they have more lane, did you say 68% of the roadway? Yeah, it's like 70% of the roads are in rural areas. 20% of the people are in rural areas, but they account for 41% of the deaths in engineering world. In our world, we call that over represented. Those numbers don't match the numbers of people who live out there, which means people are dying at disproportionate rates. It's a real tragedy. And the other thing is, too that rural areas have particular challenges that maybe big urban areas don't have. Talk a little bit about what it's like in these rural areas and some of the challenges they're up against trying to fight these crashes. Thank Jamie Sullivan 4:25 you for that question too. We do get that question a lot like, aren't all roads the same? Why is it so different in rural versus urban? So there's a lot of things that we can look at. First, we can look at Crash types tend to be a little bit different. In rural areas, we see a lot more single vehicle rollovers rural roadway departures where a car is either leaving the center line or leaving an edge line of a road, and we see a lot more head on crashes. We also see behaviors that are a little bit different. In rural areas, people tend not to use their seat belts as often in rural areas. Areas or tend to speed a little bit more. There's also a lot of unique challenges in infrastructure in rural areas, narrow lanes, we tend to not have as many shoulders in rural areas for you to recover if you do go over the edge line. I mentioned those high speeds already. There's a lot less lighting in rural areas as well. And then we have things such as unique terrain. We have a lot more horizontal and vertical curves in rural areas. We know them usually because they're places we want to go visit. They're very beautiful, but in that we have those horizontal and vertical curves that make it such. We also have a lot of road conditions and weather impacts that tend to be unique in rural areas. And then we have also different road types. We have a lot more roads that are unpaved. We have intersections that tend to be uncontrolled, so don't have stop signs or signals. And then we have a different mix of road users as well. So we have a lot of those slow moving vehicles in our agricultural areas, or horses and buggies in for some of our Amish and Mennonite communities. And then, because those rural areas tend to be more used by tourism as well, we tend to see a lot more motorcycles and recreational vehicles in our mode mix as Kevin Elliott 6:20 well. This is one of my favorite examples of how it's different in rural areas versus urban. Because on one stretch of road in rural America, you can have family on vacation in a minivan, you can have a combine. You can have an ATV, or maybe a golf cart, a horse and buggy and a motorcycle all using the same road at the same time and and you figure the roads, because there's more of them, sometimes they're not as in as great condition. They don't have the lighting and the shoulders and all. You can see how that is a challenge, I mean. And the engineers call these speed differentials, right? People are different speeds, doing different things at different times, all on the same roadways. And that is a hard thing for these rural folks to get their their arms around, because they also don't have as much enforcement. I mean, how the it's hard to police that many roads and those many lane miles? Okay, everybody, I'm having a great conversation with Jamie Sullivan, the director of the National Center for rural road safety, and we'll be right back after this break. This year, Rural Road Safety Awareness Week is July 14 through 18, and we're shining a light on something we don't talk enough about. Host crash care. This year, our theme is big league safety, and we're highlighting the Dream Team of first responders out there saving lives on rural roads, and these people face significant challenges, and so that's why we're celebrating them this week. So join us this July 14 through 18th, as we honor the people who respond support and save lives after the crash, and learn how your community can be part of getting these people what they need. Visit ruralsafetycenter.org to get involved, share your story and find resources that could save lives in your community. Together, we can make sure people get home safely. Kevin Elliott 8:14 One thing before we move on to the next thing you did a couple of terms that, again, when I came into this world, I had to ask what they meant. Tell everybody what a horizontal versus a vertical curve is. Jamie Sullivan 8:26 Yes, thank you for that question as well. A horizontal curve would be the curve turning to the right or the left, versus a vertical curve would be the one that's going up or down. Kevin Elliott 8:36 Okay, so what my favorite a vertical curve is a hill. But those matter, because a huge percentage of these fatal crashes are Lane departures on curves. People are going too fast. It may be nighttime, they might be looking at their phone, or they might be intoxicated or sleepy, or just going too quickly, that curve catches up with them, and they then run off the road, but on a vertical curve, on a hill, imagine somebody's trying to change lanes, coming over that hill, and you come up the other side of that hill. I mean, we've all seen these crashes, so just the conditions are so different out there in the rural areas, that's one thing. Talk about the average rural transportation agency or government agency or public works, whatever they because they look like a bunch of different things. Talk about some of the challenges they have, versus, say, urban areas that couple with the different terrain and the different usages of their roads. Jamie Sullivan 9:33 Our rural agencies tend to have less resources and funding. They tend to have less less people who work in them. Sometimes they don't have an engineer on staff, and need to rely on talking with their State department of transportation or their local technical assistance programs for that help. There tends to be a lack of data in our rural agencies. In some of the areas, we also have a lack. Communications and power infrastructure as well that could make it harder for them to do what they need to do in those agencies. And then, as you mentioned earlier about law enforcement, our geographical jurisdictions or the area that these agencies have to cover is usually large, very, very large compared to their urban counterparts. Kevin Elliott 10:19 Yeah, I've talked with county engineers across the country, and I remember Vic Lund from St Louis County Minnesota, told me one time he's like, Yeah, our lane miles in our county are in our county are bigger than some states in the Northeast like that. They're dealing with massive spaces, big, open spaces, long, windy roads, and much fewer resources and staff and expertise and so couple all that together, this is the pretty typical situation for a rural community. And then also, because they're rural, they all know each other. You talked about the human toll. They know who that person was at that rural intersection or run off that curve, and I know you, and I work with with them all over the country, and they're doing the best they can. That brings us to the role of the National Center for rural road safety. We were created 10 years ago by the Federal Highway Administration as a center of excellence. You were there from the very beginning. So tell everybody a little bit about the background of why this center was created to help those rural agencies. The Jamie Sullivan 11:22 Center was created to really help provide leadership, best practices, support training and technical assistance for those agencies, to be able to get them some of these resources that we mentioned that are that they currently Kevin Elliott 11:36 are lacking, also too that one of my favorite things about being a part of the center is we have a national reach. I mean, we're able to go around the country and meet these people in every state and talk with them, and learn what they're doing and and then share that across the country with others. And so that's where this hub idea comes in. Is that if you're a rural practitioner in Alabama, somebody's figured out some awesome thing in rural Ohio that can help you. You probably don't have the resources to ever meet that person, but we probably do, and we can share that stuff across the country with practitioners who need it. Jamie Sullivan 12:12 Absolutely. That's one of my favorite technical assistance requests that we receive. Is just needing resources or a peer to speak about about a particular topic, and we really do serve as that convener to be able to get them to those people. The other thing that I really love doing is helping some of these national conferences figure out what kind of safety topics they might want to talk about in their safety tracks, and also help them find the right speakers to be able to do that. And I know when both you and I, Kevin, go and speak at some of these national conferences as well, and I feel like our biggest thing that we do there is really stand up and be able to be that person that talks about these rural challenges and topics. Many times, rural tends to be forgotten on the national level. And we really get to be there and be that person jumping up and down and saying, Don't forget rural they you know, there are some unique things that need to be thought about when you're talking about rural. Kevin Elliott 13:08 I'm really glad you brought that up, because we talk a lot about this internally, that we do a lot of translation for rural folks, whether it's guidance or funding streams or technical assistance or new countermeasures. And for those of you don't know what a counter measure is, is like something that will make the road safer. So like a chevron sign, if you're going around a curve, you see the little pointy signs. That's a counter measure to help you get around that curve. A lot of times, because the rural folks are usually more strapped for resources, we can translate some of that stuff for them. So if some big national thing comes out, we can say, Okay, here's what this means for you in rural areas. Maybe talk about some of the documents that have been put out, like proven safety countermeasures for rural areas and this for rural areas that we that we help Jamie Sullivan 13:53 with. So Federal Highway Administration and NHTSA, the National Highway of Traffic Safety Administration just put out these countermeasure documents, very specific for rural communities. And that's been really helpful, because it takes out some of those things that are too urban, and really focuses in on examples of how they've been used or adapted to be used in rural communities. And it's fantastic to see those types of resources really pointed for a rural community and what their unique challenges are. One of the ones that our center has put out as well is a Intelligent Transportation Systems toolkit that was focused for rural that takes, you know, some of those things that may not be considered as innovative in a urban area, but are most certainly innovative in a rural area, Kevin Elliott 14:45 right? So it's very easy to talk about connected and automated vehicles and the Internet of everything and how everything's going to talk to everything, but in rural areas, like if I have a county in Wyoming and most of my roads are gravel and we don't have Street in. Amps or lights. It's hard to build in this sort of intelligent transportation system stuff. It means a different thing in those areas, right? They don't. They just don't have the infrastructure to build some of these really amazing, truly amazing and innovative things that are out there. They just, they just can't do it. They're just trying to get people to stay on their roadways out there in the rural areas, one of the things that we do. One of our big pushes at the center every year is Rural Road Safety Awareness Week. Jamie Sullivan 15:26 So we started Rural Road Safety Awareness Week about five years ago, and it was really supposed to be a week to talk about some of these topics and really explain to people why rural road safety is so important, and what some of these unique challenges are. And that first year, that's really what we focused on, was telling the rural story and getting out some of the resources that exist. It can be both aimed at practitioners and the public, and it's really a social media driven campaign that we do. So there's typically a large theme topic for the entire week, and then each day breaks it down a little bit into smaller daily topics as Kevin Elliott 16:09 well. And the idea is to is to really get people just talking about kind of like, what you and I've been talking about, one, how big a problem this is in rural areas. And then also, too, don't lose hope. There are things we can do. And every year we pick a theme, like a one topic, a theme that we can send out to people to focus on and tell everybody what our theme is this year. Jamie Sullivan 16:36 So for this year, our theme is post crash care, big league safety, and we're using graphics that would be around the baseball topic or theme. And we're really excited about talking about this particular one Kevin Elliott 16:48 excellent we'll talk more about that and how people can get involved. After this short break in rural communities, a crash doesn't just happen on the road, it ripples through the whole town. This year, Rural Road Safety Awareness Week shines a light on something we don't talk about enough, post crash care, because survival doesn't end at the moment of impact. It depends on what happens next. Our theme is big league safety with a spotlight on post crash care, because in life's biggest moments, we need an all star team, responders, dispatchers, medical crews, law enforcement and communities who know how to move fast, work together and save lives. So step into the lineup. Learn how your community can improve post crash care and be part of big league safety. Visit ruralsafetycenter.org to find resources, share your story and join the team that's helping rural America get home safely. So post crash care, first of all, what even is that? And then, why is it such an important thing that we're we're building our whole campaign around it? Jamie Sullivan 17:55 Well, we talked a little bit earlier about how many fatalities there are every year with car crashes, and how we really want to be able to drive that down to zero. And so one way that we can do that, as as practitioners or people that work in this space is through a framework work called the safe system approach. And the safe system approach has five different elements within it. It talks about safe roads, safe road users, safe vehicles and safe speeds. And the last one is post crash care. And so we know that post crash care is really our safety net of the entire safe system approach. If you have been in a crash, this is your your lifeline, your last chance to not be one of those fatalities. And so we really want to talk this year about what things we all can do to help make sure that fatalities don't occur, even if a crash does occur, Kevin Elliott 18:53 one of the most eye opening things I've learned in the last year, I think maybe you did too. We had a forum meeting to talk about rural road safety. And we had some emergency management folks, those post crash care people. These are the people who, you know, the first responders, ambulances and and all that, all that stuff. And they blew us away when they were describing what a challenge it is out there on rural roads according to the safe system approach, and just to common sense, is that we would like to do everything we can to prevent crashes from happening in the first place. That's what all those countermeasures are about, and education campaigns and law enforcement and safer cars. And that are, that are all that assistive technology and that they're they have in them if the worst happens, if all that fails and you get into a severe crash in the rural area, you need one of these first responders to come get you. I guess I had never really grappled with how hard that is out there. That's why we made it. Our theme this year was post crash care that really rose to the top. It was a big moment for us tell the audience a little bit what it's like for a first responder. Or these post crash care people in rural areas. Jamie Sullivan 20:03 So we talked a lot about those larger jurisdictions, and that certainly is the case for our first responders as well. So it could take them longer to get to a crash site than in an urban area. Some of their other challenges would be we talked about the lack of communication that happens in rural areas too. So even just someone being able to notify 911, could be a challenge if you're in an area that doesn't have that communication. And then one of the other things that we also heard loud and clear is that emergency medical services are not an essential service in many of the states, and that's a really big challenge for them to be able to get enough funding to be able to help with being able to provide post crash care as well. Kevin Elliott 20:50 In the same vein, just imagine if you're in a city or in any kind of populated area, and you call an ambulance or a firefighter or a police officer, you expect them to be there in minutes. That's the that's just the norm. But if you are out there in if you're on vacation, or you're riding a motorcycle in rural Colorado, and it's wintertime and you're in the mountains, it could be two hours before they can get to you. And we know if you've heard of the golden hour, I don't know if our audience has heard of that, but the idea is that you need those first responders to get there. Within that first hour after a crash, your chances of surviving are much, much higher, and if you just can't get to them, that's a real, real problem out in these rural areas, which is why the safe system approach and prevention is such a big part of our messaging is to get those countermeasures out there, and let's not, let's not have to call the ambulance in the first Jamie Sullivan 21:43 place. Absolutely true, and there's a lot that we can do to try and prevent a crash from happening. And then if a crash does happen, there's a lot of things that we can do to help within that golden hour as well, and some of those might consist of bystanders being able to help and having the correct training to be able to help for that, and we're going to address all of that in post crash care in our Rural Road Safety Awareness Week in just a couple of Kevin Elliott 22:09 weeks. One other big signature offering, one of our big jobs at the Safety Center, is to equip and train people, not just people who are specialists in safety or even just engineers. We want everyone in every public agency or organization to have some basic roadway safety knowledge, because just like you said, it's all hands on deck out there. So we created a training product called the Road Safety champion program that is free for people to use. Tell everybody about the about the Road Safety Champion Program. Jamie Sullivan 22:41 So our road safety Champion Program is a safety 101, certificate program, not to be confused with a certification that exists from other places or a degree, but it's really, as you mentioned, trying to get everyone to have a baseline of safety knowledge so that they can make the right decisions out on the roadway to really help with safety. And so we've broken our program up into five different pieces. Everyone who takes the program takes seven core modules, and then we have career pathways that you choose from, and you can choose from, one for maintenance and construction, one for planning and engineering, one for first responders and one for public health. And in each of those career pathways, we have different modules or courses that you take on topics that are really relevant to safety for your particular Kevin Elliott 23:32 pathway. And the idea is that 101 safety, 101 is a is how we describe it to people, but this is for everybody. From like you said, maintenance people. You can send your receptionist if you have a public works like everybody needs to have some basic roadway safety knowledge. And that's the entire point. We saw a hole in that hole in that marketplace, just that basic knowledge for people who don't work in this every day, or maybe you're a rural practitioner in a public works department, and roadways are just one small sliver of what you do because you deal with all the other public works. This is just a way for you and your people to get some basic safety knowledge so everybody can help. And this is a free course, right? Jamie Sullivan 24:14 It is absolutely free at the center. We give it twice a year, virtually, and then we do have our friends at the local technical assistance programs across the country, and several of them are offering these modules as well, also virtually. So there's several different ways that you can take this free program. And as you mentioned, it is fantastic. With it being a safety 101, program and trying to just get that baseline knowledge, it really helps so that when you are asked to do something out on the road, you can really understand why some of our favorite classes that people take are class where you identify what some of the challenges are out on the roadway. We'll show photos of what some issues could be. That, that if you are a maintenance staff or someone that's out on the roads all the time, and you're able to identify that issue, then you're able to report it back and have it fixed. And so that's one of the favorite classes that we take when we really get to go through all of those photos, identify the issue, figure out what, what could be a solution to that problem, and then know who to contact to be able to tell that that issue is out on your roadway, we've Kevin Elliott 25:23 heard some neat success stories around that, and we even recommend it for elected officials. You want them to have this knowledge too, right? So if you can, then you the technical people now have a common vocabulary with your your elected officials who are making decisions on money and staffing and priorities for your area. This really is a course for everybody, and you could take it at your own pace and in whatever order, right? Jamie Sullivan 25:45 Absolutely true. Take it at your own pace, whatever order that you'd like. We have 1000s of people who are signed up and have started the program, and we're lucky enough to say that we have over 150 people who have graduated from the program so far, and who have become road safety champions from across the country. Kevin Elliott 26:05 And I want to reiterate the L taps the local technical assistance programs, because people may not know they have one in their state, and not all the L taps are delivering this, but tell everybody what an L tap is. I think that's important. Jamie Sullivan 26:18 So an L tap is a state based program that also provides training and technical assistance. They do so for all of transportation, and not just on the safety side. So while we specialize in safety, they do a lot more for the various different pieces of transportation, and so they're there and available to really help all of their locals within a state. Kevin Elliott 26:41 Every state has one. And you can just google your state name and put in the letters L, T, A, P, and you'll find them. And they're wonderful people. They are great partners of ours because they're out there. They're, you know, they're 52, of them, and we're just one of us. And so we partner with them a lot, because they training is what they do. And so you can, you can just Google you where your L tap is, talk to those folks and see if they offer the Road Safety champion program if, for some reason, our schedule doesn't match with yours or or whatever it is, but we do recommend you go meet your L tap anyway, because they're, they're wonderful folks, and they're super eager to help. And literally, their job is to help train and equip people in your state. So we always want to give a shout out to the to the L taps. We love them. We Jamie Sullivan 27:24 do love them, and we do partner with them on quite a few things. And one of those things would be our monthly webinar series that we host. We do that in conjunction with the L tap Safety Working Group. And those monthly webinars are really on topics that are important to our practitioners. And we talk about things from all four of those career pathways that I talked about earlier, so maintenance and construction, planning and engineering, first responder or public health. And each month, we pick a different topic to address. They last about an hour and a half, and we have guest speakers come in and train those subject matter experts. Are the ones that we're having come in and really talk about all of these various topics. And then we record them and we do post them to our website. So there's this very long archive of past webinars on important safety topics available on our website as Kevin Elliott 28:18 well. And so that's that hub piece we want to we want to bring you the best knowledge from rural areas and practitioners around the country. Put them in one place, and so you just come there and you can either find what you're looking for, or you can contact us, and we will do our best to connect you to that kind of information. It's really become just that a real nice hub and a networking place for for rural practitioners to find each other and to share knowledge back and forth, and those webinars are free as well, right? Jamie Sullivan 28:47 Those webinars are free. And speaking also of being a hub, one of the other things that we do that I want to make sure people know about is our bi weekly training e blasts. And so you can get on this list through our home page of our website, which is rural safety center.org, and you can sign up for our email distribution list, and every two weeks, we'll send out one of these training e blasts. And on that, what you get is a collated information on upcoming safety trainings, safety conferences, and also public awareness weeks on safety, and we're really gathering these from multiple sources and organizations and putting them in one email for you, right in your inbox, so that you don't have to do the work and go out and look for all of those ones that exist. We're putting it together and sending it right to you. Kevin Elliott 29:34 You're probably picking up a theme audience that, like our job is to find this stuff, collate it, curate it for you, put it in one place for you to find, and then you can, you can sort of get a national view of what's going on in rural areas, but also get information and translation from the federal government. We want to do our best to make sure you can find what you need quickly. Just start there, and our contact information is on rural Safety Center. Center.org like Jamie said, Our contact information is on the website. You can you can email us at info, at rural safety center.org our our leadership teams. Emails are up there. You can get a hold of us. Please subscribe to to our emails. We really do just try and provide that steady stream of very current, relevant information for rural areas. Jamie, anything else about the center, or about our work, or about trends in in rural road safety that are happening right now, that that I haven't asked you about that you think are important? Jamie Sullivan 30:34 No, I think we've covered just about everything. I do want to thank you for having me on the show today. And I also want to thank everyone for listening. And if you've never heard of us before at the National Center for rural road safety, I'd like to welcome you to our community. Please sign up for our distribution list, and that will get you everything that you need to know about upcoming resources, rural grants, that opportunities that are coming out, those bi weekly e blasts, any of our upcoming trainings or webinars, we'd love to have you be one of our rural road safety champions. So please join us. We're Kevin Elliott 31:09 a fun bunch, right? It's meaningful work. It's meaningful work to save lives in our rural areas. We always want to grow our network, and we want to we want to meet you. Jamie Sullivan, Director of the National Center for rural road safety. Thank you for being on thank you for taking the time, thanks for directing the center, and thanks for being our very first guest in the whole wide world. Thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for riding along with us on home safely. If you liked this episode, please subscribe and share it with others who care about making rural roads safer for more resources training or upcoming events, visit us@ruralsafetycenter.org and until next time, stay safe. Stay connected, and let's all get home safe. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai