Serious Injury Rate (per hundred million vehicle miles traveled) on All Public Roads in Kansas

This measure is an indicator of how well safety programs are performing.  This may include programs to raise awareness of seat belt usage, distracted driving and impaired driving.  All figures are for calendar years.

Nationally, mainly attributed to the significant increase in vehicle miles traveled, the number of injuries has increased over the past couple of years.  In Kansas, 85 percent of crashes are attributed to driver error.  The more miles driven leads to greater exposure, increase in crashes and therefore, increase in the number of injuries.  KDOT will continue our educational and law enforcement partner campaigns to bring greater awareness to the role of the driver and their responsibility not only to themselves, but the general driving public.  KDOT will also continue to spend our safety-specific federal and state engineering dollars in a manner consistent with our Strategic Highway Safety Plan. It is worth noting, that although injuries have increased, serious or disabling injuries have been trending down over the past several years.

In some cases, quarterly data has been annualized to provide a better comparison to prior fiscal years.  Generally, measures that use percentages have been annualized.  This prevents distortions in the quarterly data that may occur because of smaller populations sizes.  Measures that show the numbers of incidents, activities or individuals reflect actual numbers for the quarter.  This allows users to see progress from one quarter to the next towards identified goals.