Administration of Highway and Transportation Agencies. State DOT Employee Safety and Serious Injury and Fatality Data Standardization

Occupational serious injuries and fatalities (SIF) are a significant risk to state department of transportation (DOT) workforces. Data associated with these events are inconsistently tracked, manually analyzed, exclusively housed inside state DOTs, and often inform lagging indicators rather than leading indicators. This issue has become important for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the North American Association of Transportation Safety and Health Officials (NAATSHO) and has resulted in initiatives to bring together a cross-section of transportation stakeholders to address workforce safety. However, the unique nature of state DOT field operations, including disaster and emergency responses, adds to the difficulty of data tracking and standardization. NCHRP Synthesis 637: Tracking Safety Leading Indicators to Improve DOT Employee Safety Performance (2025) details the current data sharing gaps among state DOTs in relevant metrics for data-driven decisions on safety initiatives and resources. Workforce safety data standardization could overcome these gaps, and state DOTs would gain the ability to benchmark with other state DOTs to collaborate on successful employee safety and health programs, identify areas of greatest return on investment, or gain predictive insights into actions to take at worksites to prevent SIF. Research is needed to standardize SIF data to yield these benefits in future research projects. To accomplish this, a framework is needed to document and share SIF data and best practices across state DOTs. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this research is to develop a consensus framework for standardizing state DOT workforce safety and SIF data, validated through pilot programs with state DOTs, that enables future national benchmarking. Optimally, this framework would align workforce safety data with other relevant state DOT data standardization efforts.

• Record URL:
  • http://apps.trb.org/cmsfeed/TRBNetProjectDisplay.asp?ProjectID=6013

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Proposed
• Funding: $400,000.00
• Contract Numbers:

  Project 20-24(157)

• Sponsor Organizations:

  State Departments of Transportation (participating member states of American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO))

  American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO)
  444 North Capitol Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001

  Federal Highway Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP)

  Transportation Research Board
  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Project Managers:

  Wadsworth, Trey

• Start Date: 20270401
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 0

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Crash injuries; Fatalities; Occupational safety; Personnel; State departments of transportation
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01979238
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Transportation Research Board
• Contract Numbers: Project 20-24(157)
• Files: TRB, RIP
• Created Date: Feb 9 2026 8:28PM