State Farm® provides grant funding to produce publications and resources for highway safety professionals on a wide range of topics.
Distracted driving is one of the most dangerous – but common – activities on the road. To help change the culture and create a new social norm, the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) and State Farm® partnered to develop a new website to help parents and guardians raise a generation of distraction-free, safe road users. Teaching children to stay focused on their surroundings – whether they’re driving, biking, walking or scooting – can help protect them and everyone else on the road.
State Farm® has been a long-time GHSA partner, providing grant funding to produce publications and resources for State Highway Safety Offices (SHSOs) and other highway safety professionals, on topics ranging from micromobility and automated vehicles to drowsy driving and pedestrian and bicyclist safety.
State Farm was founded in 1922 to provide competitively priced auto insurance to farmers. To commemorate this centennial anniversary, they partnered with GHSA to address rural road safety. More than half of all crashes nationally occur on rural roads. State Highway Safety Offices (SHSOs) face unique but universal challenges on these roads, including fewer resources and countermeasure options, less police and EMS presence, more haphazard crash patterns, fewer transportation options, and unique culture.
GHSA’s report, America's Rural Roads: Beautiful and Deadly, found that 85,002 people have died in crashes on rural roads between 2016 and 2020, the five most recent years of data. That’s more than the entire population of Scranton, Pa., or the seating capacity of Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers. In 2020, the risk of dying in a crash was 62% higher on a rural road compared to an urban road for the same trip length. While rural road deaths fell for several years before the pandemic, they increased in 2020, mirroring what happened across the country.
While advances in vehicle automation hold promise for improving safety, they raise safety concerns for our nation’s first responders.
State Farm® provided funding to GHSA to examine how law enforcement officials, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, crash scene investigators and other first responders can better prepare for today and tomorrow’s AV technology. The resulting report published in 2021, Law Enforcement, First Responder and Crash Investigation Preparation for Automated Vehicle Technology, outlines curriculum recommendations to improve training on rapidly changing safety protocols.
The report, which was prepared by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, addresses the current and projected state of automated vehicle technologies. It also incorporates discussions with government administrators, first responders, law enforcement organizations, automakers, crash reconstruction experts, and insurance and safety advocates to identify where training is most needed. Researchers used this information to design a curriculum development strategy for training law enforcement and other first responders and crash investigators tasked with addressing these motor vehicle crashes and incidents.
State Farm® has also provided support for GHSA to conduct research and produce publications on bicyclist and micromobility safety, drowsy driving, teen distracted driving and a host of other critical safety topics.
