With over 680,000 miles of roadway—more than any other state—and approximately 22 million registered vehicles, Texas faces transportation challenges. This is particularly evident where safety is concerned. According to the most recent available data from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), 15,219 serious injury crashes occurred in 2023, highlighting a critical need for safer road systems. Transportation engineering plays a pivotal role in addressing safety challenges. Beyond simply moving vehicles across the expansive Lone Star State, modern transportation engineering approaches need to integrate safety considerations at every stage—from planning and design to construction and maintenance. The difference between standard road design and safety-optimized engineering can quite literally save lives.
Transportation Safety Concerns in Texas
Texas presents a uniquely complex transportation environment for a variety of reasons. With its combination of sprawling urban centers, vast rural expanses, and growing population, the state’s roadways can quickly become dangerous for even the most seasoned motorists. In fact, Texas consistently ranks among the states with the highest number of traffic fatalities per capita.
The biggest concern is the state’s expansive geography and varied terrain. Along dense urban corridors, high traffic volumes and complex interchanges create congestion points that increase crash risks. Rural highways present a different set of challenges with higher speeds, limited lighting, and greater distances between emergency services.
Weather-related factors further exacerbate safety issues across the state:
- Flash flooding in Central Texas caused by violent summer storms
- Hurricane vulnerability along the Gulf Coast
- Extreme heat affecting road materials and surface integrity
- Ice storms creating hazardous conditions in North Texas
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 31 million people reside in Texas, with more than 133,000 net new residents in 2023 alone. With over a million in population moving in or out of the state adds a tremendous strain on Texas’ many highways. Increasingly, the onus of providing safety mobility falls on the civil engineers who are charged with expanding, operating, and maintaining them.
LJA’s Approach to Transportation Safety
At LJA, we don’t just build roads, we aim to help make every journey safer for motorists. Our team tackles transportation safety by getting to know each project’s unique challenges inside and out. We dive into real world data and review historical crash data to uncover what truly impacts transportation safety. By analyzing crash histories, we identify crash patterns tied to location, contributing causes, geometrical design parameters and constraints, roadway design, and weather conditions. Our team of engineers not only evaluate existing corridor safety conditions but also conduct predictive safety analysis for future conditions to foresee and evaluate impacts or identify mitigations.
Further, we also evaluate existing and future traffic operations to spot deficiencies that may pose safety risks. From there, we collaborate with stakeholders to explore and screen potential solutions, ultimately identifying the preferred alternative that delivers the greatest safety benefit to the community.
Our transportation professionals take pride in developing creative, practical solutions to complex infrastructure challenges. Whether it’s expanding interchange capacity within a constrained corridor to handle growing traffic demand, enhancing neighborhood safety through innovative intersection designs, or engineering a custom triple I-beam steel bridge girder to support direct connectors without disrupting traffic operations during construction, we’re committed to pushing boundaries. Our goal is to deliver solutions that improve mobility, safety, and efficiency both during construction and long after.
Building a Safer Road Ahead for Texas
At LJA, we’ve seen firsthand how thoughtful infrastructure can transform dangerous intersections into smooth-flowing junctions and hazardous highways into reliable routes. Our team includes Registered Accessibility Specialists (RAS), Professional Traffic Operations Engineers (PTOE), and Road Safety Professional Certified (RSPC) experts who not only evaluate existing corridor safety conditions but also conduct predictive analyses to anticipate impacts and identify effective mitigations.
If you’re facing transportation safety challenges on your next project, we’d welcome the opportunity to help craft solutions that keep Texas moving forward, safely. Contact us today!
