Chances are if you spend much time driving, you’ve come up on a line of traffic that is stopped or slowed down due to road construction. These lines or “queues” as traffic safety professionals call them, put drivers at a high risk of rear-end crashes if they’re not paying close attention to what is up ahead. This construction season the Iowa DOT explored additional technology that can provide drivers with more detailed information about stopped or slow traffic ahead.
Ghouls, goblins, superheroes, cartoon characters, little pumpkins, and every zoo animal or pop culture icon imaginable may be coming to your door this weekend for Trick or Treat. If you are transporting your little trick-or-treater in a vehicle, make sure they are securely fastened in an appropriate child safety seat or seat belt.
Highway maintenance workers will tell you, to work along the road, you must keep a constant eye on both the work you are doing and the traffic moving around you. But splitting your concentration isn’t ideal and it can be dangerous.
As part of the Iowa DOT’s Business Plan, a one-year objective for 2022 seeks to “Improve Work Zone Safety.” One element of that objective is focused on helping motorists better see work zones, theoretically helping them avoid crashes in work areas. With the 2020 deaths of two of our employees, Lynn Roder and Jeff Arbogast, fresh in our hearts and minds, this objective has become even more urgent.
Whether you’re planning a weekend getaway or a trip to visit family and friends, having the best information about your route will help you have a safer, quicker, and less stressful journey. While winter is coming, the Iowa Department of Transportation and our construction partners will still have many active work zones as long as the weather holds. These work zones and associated delays can sometimes put a kink in your travel plans if you’re not prepared for them.
Making sure you are paying attention when you’re driving near those working on the road is essential to helping you avoid a crash and keeping everyone in the area safe, the main priority of the Iowa Department of Transportation. Last year we told you about a program that added a loud noise to a piece of equipment known as an attenuator. An attenuator is typically a trailer pulled by a large truck. Their purpose is to block oncoming traffic from entering a work zone and they are designed to take a hit instead of a worker if a driver happens to not be paying attention. While we’ve seen success with adding sound to this equipment, the next step to keeping you safer on the road is to automate the triggering of the noise.
Your future is in jeopardy, but not the way the characters in Back to the Future envisioned. Our friends, neighbors, and family members are dying on Iowa’s roads almost daily. Speeding, even at more than 100 miles per hour, is become all too common, according to our law enforcement partners.
In Iowa in 2021, excessive speed or aggressive driving was noted as a contributing factor in 176, or almost half, of the 356 total deaths. Simply slowing down and reducing aggressive movements like tailgating, quick lane changes, running red lights, and changing lanes without signaling can save lives.
Our 10-year goal of “Safest, Smartest, Made to Last” not only applies to the transportation system itself, but also to the equipment we use to maintain that system. Our road heroes and snowfighters spend a lot of time behind the wheel of a truck. Making sure each piece of equipment is designed and built to get the job done as efficiently and safely as possible t is essential to us helping us achieve this goal.
Teen Driver Safety Week starts Sunday. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, teen drivers have a higher rate of fatal crashes, mainly because of their immaturity, lack of experience, and underdeveloped skills. They speed, they make mistakes, and they get distracted easily – especially if their friends are in the car. You won’t always be in the vehicle with your teen driver but instilling some basic safety rules, like limiting the number of passengers, could help your child become a safer driver.
Iowa’s graduated driver’s license was put in place to help teens get the experience they need to be safe drivers while reducing some of the risks. If your child has successfully passed driver’s education and is 16, the next step on the way to becoming a safer driver is an “intermediate” license. Here are the “dos” and “don’ts” of this license type. Pay special notice to the passenger restrictions.