FREDERICKSBURG, Va. (Jan. 7, 2021) – The American Traffic Safety Services Association  selected nine companies to participate in its 2021 New Products Rollout  event, which is held in conjunction with the 51st Annual Convention & Traffic Expo being held online over two weeks in February.

Typically, more than 3,700 people attend the largest roadway safety tradeshow in North America to see some of the latest innovations in the roadway safety infrastructure industry. The products submitted as part of NPRO are comprised of a wide range of devices designed to save lives on our nation’s roadways.

This year’s Convention is being held Feb. 8-12 and 16-18.

Additional responses to questions submitted to The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) regarding the testing of roadside safety hardware under the Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) 2016 were released Monday. 

The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) needs an update, and ATSSA is playing a major role in the process. The current edition of the roadway safety infrastructure industry’s guide to keeping drivers and roadway workers safe was published in 2009.

The American Traffic Safety Services Association (ATSSA) will partner with FailSafe-ERA on the Right Road Job Training and Placement Program, a program that helps qualified returning citizens receive the training and job resources they need to put them on a path to success in temporary  traffic control.

Reducing fatalities on rural roads remains a major challenge in the United States. In 2016, 18,590 lives were lost on rural roads—more than half of all traffic deaths—even though only 19 percent of the U.S. population lives in rural areas. Two-thirds of these rural fatalities involved a roadway departure, where a vehicle crosses a center line, an edge line, or otherwise leaves its travel lane.

Roadway departure countermeasures are regularly used on roads with higher functional classifications and are proven methods for reducing crashes and improving the safety of the transportation system. Crash modification factors have been developed and promoted for several of these countermeasures, and they can be applied more broadly using existing tools and processes.