U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) wrote to Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Administrator Nicole Nasin last week asking for updates on improvements the organization has undertaken for highway guardrail safety.
”As you know there have been several deaths in the United States that are attributed to malfunctioning guardrail end terminals and that several states including Virginia, Missouri, Tennessee, and Maryland have all announced plans to replace these products with a new, safer model or have removed the item from their list of approved products,” the senators wrote.
In June 2016, the Government Accountability Office (CAO) issued five recommendations to the FHWA alongside a report on the issue. Only two of the five recommendations have been resolved so far, while more people have died, including a Private First Class in Maryland. It is this fact that spurred the senators.
The outstanding GAO recommendations include that the FHWA provide additional guidance to crash-test labs and accreditation bodies to ensure a clear separation between device development and testing in cases where testing devices developed within their parent organization; that FHWA develop a means of third-party verification of crash-test lab results; and that FHWA support additional research, as well as spread the results of roadside safety hardware’s in-service performance.
“We are very concerned about the lack of urgency by your agency in responding to the GAO’s recommendations to improve the process by which guardrails are approved for use on our nation’s roads,” the senators wrote. “As you know, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Committee recently passed America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act of 2019, which includes a directive to FHWA to implement these recommendations.”
More problematic still to the senators is that the FHWA has stated it will not report results from its current pilot study on guardrail end terminals’ performance due to sample sizes that seemed too small. Nor do they intend to research in-service performance evaluations further.
The senators demanded to know why the FHWA no longer intended to report the results of its pilot study and what resources they would need to make a sample size they deemed large enough for use.