As part of the state’s five-year traffic safety plan, dynamic message signs in Southern Nevada are displaying messages warning motorists about just how deadly it can be to speed.
The messages being displayed by the Nevada Department of Transportation on freeway signs in the Las Vegas Valley include:
Over 75 MPH +76% FATAL RISK
Over 80 MPH +129% FATAL RISK
Over 85 MPH +191% FATAL RISK
The signage highlighting the dangers of exceeding the speed limit are a spin-off from the state’s previous highway safety plan, which underscored the fatality and serious injury risk associated with such crashes, Lacey Tisler, NDOT’s chief traffic safety engineer said.
“During that time, the Nevada DOT put together the speed management action plan, looking at all the contributing factors and locations for speed-related fatalities, really understanding the risk that kinetic energy and rapid drops of speed can do to the human body,” she said. “So, reducing that speed reduces injury severity. It also reduces crash risk because it gives, well, anyone on the roadway, not just our driver, time to predict, adapt and move out of any potentially harmful situations. And then when they end up in the situations, there’s less of a risk of bodily harm.”
State officials are looking to curb fatal and serious injury crashes by 35 percent over the next five years.
NDOT’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan for 2026-2030, a requirement by the Federal Highway Administration, outlines how the state plans to reduce fatal and serious injury traffic crashes.
“It’s data-driven using the best available safety data, not just crash data, to understand the Nevada’s traffic safety priorities and reduce and ultimately eliminate fatalities in all of the roadways,” Tisler said.
Cutting crashes
Between 2019 and 2023, Nevada saw 1,689 fatalities and 4,407 serious injuries on its roadways, according to NDOT.
The U.S. Department of Transportation released a goal of zero fatalities by 2050, and Nevada joined that goal a few years ago. The 35 percent goal is tied to those efforts and is more of an interim goal.
“But this plan, since it just ends in 2030, we wanted to look at a little bit bigger window,” Tisler said. “So, we increased the goal to 35 by (20)35.”
The safety plan uses crash data to target safety strategies to address the state’s highest-risk crash factors. The safety plan includes transportation agencies, law enforcement, public health officials, emergency responders and community partners in a coordinated effort to implement engineering improvements, increase enforcement, expand education campaigns and enhance emergency response.
“I look at that as the DOT: Our roadways cross, they intersect, they turn into city and county roadways,” Tisler said, underscoring the need to share responsibility and information with everybody who has an impact on the road. “Safety’s proactive, so having conversations like the conversation we’re having today to talk about things before they happen — talk about how we can build community, help the public, help our partners in the media understand what we’re doing — we’re going to see (that) as crucial.”
The progress is tracked via the number of fatalities, fatality rate, serious injury rate and number of non-motorized fatalities and serious injuries. The performance measures are reported annually to the Federal Highway Administration.
Vulnerable road users
A large portion of the plan revolves around vulnerable road users, which include pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, scooter riders and those in wheelchairs. Of the 6,096 serious injury or fatal crashes in the state between 2019 and 2023, 1,339 of those included vulnerable road users, according to state data.
One of the data points used in the plan is what day of the week and what time of day that serious injury and fatal crashes occur.
Data shows that we are more likely to see an upward trend between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m., with between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. when the most serious injury and fatal crashes occur involving vulnerable road users between 2019 and 2023.
“I don’t want to say things like congestion are actually a safety strategy because truly they’re not,” Tisler said. “They’re kind of consequences of our system. However, your speed and therefore your kinetic energy when you’re in congestion is generally very reduced. And that’s what we see during the day. So we don’t have the opportunity for the system to provide you space for those behaviors. You see those more at night, you see those more on the weekends when we have less people on the roadways. And then generally, culturally, there’s less inhibitions to our behavior, you know, outside of our normal working day.”
The most dangerous days of the week on Nevada roads for vulnerable road users are Friday and Saturday, when 432 fatal or serious injury crashes occurred between 2019 and 2023.
“There is a strong overlap of both speed and impairment in many crashes,” Tisler said. “So don’t look at those two numbers separately because every time we report a speed crash, we report it only on that checkbox. Same thing with the impairment crash, only on that checkbox. There’s a huge number that align. So yeah, absolutely. Speed and impairment, they’re hand in hand and they do often cause fatal results.”
Lighting is also a key factor to crashes involving vulnerable road users. If you can’t see something, you can’t respond to it on the road, Tisler said.
“As a human, as a driver, as anybody who’s moving on the roadway, ensuring that we have both proper vehicle lighting and proper lighting for the modes, pedestrian lighting in higher traffic locations because a typical street light does not illuminate a pedestrian well,” Tisler said. “So making sure we have the right lighting for the right mode so that people can see and predict what’s coming, react, and not be in a place where, sadly, a driver has to report again that they struck and killed somebody and never saw them until the impact happened.”
Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on X. Send questions and comments to roadwarrior@reviewjournal.com
