United States Department of Transportation
i
Office of Inspector General Audit Report: FHWA Provides Sufficient Guidance and Assistance To Implement the Highway Safety Improvement Program but Could Do More To Assess Program Results
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2013-03-26
[PDF-121.91 KB]
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Abstract:Reducing the number of fatalities and serious injuries on our Nation’s highways continues to be a top safety priority for the Department of Transportation (DOT). The Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) is the primary DOT program for reducing fatalities and serious injuries on roadways through infrastructure improvements, such as guard rails or rumble strips. HSIP has received approximately $8.4 billion in funding from 2006 through 2011. The current surface transportation authorization, the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21),1 continues HSIP and increases its funding to roughly $2.4 billion per year for the next 2 years. Given the major contribution HSIP is intended to make to highway safety and the large funding levels involved, we initiated this audit to assess whether FHWA (1) provides sufficient guidance and assistance to enable the States to effectively implement the data-driven, performance-based approach called for in HSIP legislation and (2) evaluates HSIP results, which States report to FHWA annually, to determine the program’s impact. To conduct our audit, we reviewed laws, regulations, and guidance pertaining to HSIP and interviewed FHWA Office of Safety staff responsible for the program. We collected and evaluated the annual reports submitted by each of the 50 States and the District of Columbia in 2011 to determine how responsive States were to HSIP requirements and guidance. Based on this information, we interviewed FHWA Division and State transportation officials about program implementation from a statistically selected sample of nine of 51 States. We also reviewed different methods States used to identify the impact of HSIP-funded projects and those the FHWA Office of Safety used to evaluate the impact of HSIP nationally. We conducted our work between February 2012 and January 2013 in accordance with generally accepted Government auditing standards. Exhibit A provides more detail on our audit scope and methodology.
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