The Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) is a Federal-aid program designed to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries on all public roads, including non-State-owned roads and roads on tribal land.

Every state department of transportation (DOT) is required to submit to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) a Highway Safety Improvement Program annual report that:

• Describes the progress being made to implement highway safety improvement projects;
• Assesses the effectiveness of those improvements; and,
• Describes the extent to which the improvements have contributed to reducing fatalities and serious injuries on all public roads.

The safety performance analysis in the report describes the state trends in the federal safety performance measures (and others if desired), established targets, the basis for the targets, and how the targets support the State’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan (SHSP) goals. The FHWA evaluates the state HSIP reports and determines that a State DOT has met or made significant progress toward meeting its safety performance targets when at least four of the targets have been met or the actual outcome is better than the baseline performance. If FHWA determines that a State DOT has not met its targets then the State DOT must obligate the HSIP funds apportioned in the previous year to only HSIP projects and submit a HSIP implementation plan.

State Targets

WisDOT has developed targets with the goal of reducing crashes in all measures by 2%. The baseline for 2022 targets is the 5-year average for 2016-2020.

WisDOT Highway Safety Improvement Program Performance Targets, 2022

The 2021 MnDOT targets were established based on a trend from the 2019 outcome to the Strategic Highway Safety Plan goal for 2025 of no more than 225 traffic deaths and 980 serious injuries.

MnDOT Highway Safety Improvement Program Performance Targets, 2022

Local Performance

Fatalities in the planning area in 2019 (3) were down 57.1% from the 5-year average for 2015-2019 (7.0) while serious injuries in 2019 (61) were up 6.3% from the 5-year average for 2015-2019 (57.4). Non-motorized fatalities and serious injuries in 2019 (9) was at its lowest total since 2015, resulting in a drop of 6.3% from the 5-year average of 9.6.

The rates (number of occurrences divided by million vehicle miles traveled) for fatalities, serious injuries, and non-motorized fatalities and serious injuries for 2012-2019 are shown in the figure below along with the trends in the moving averages from 2012-2016 to 2015-2019. From 2012-2016 to 2015-2019, the 5-year averages for the serious injury and non-motorized rates declined 25.6% and 29.5%, respectively. Then change in the 5-year average fatality rate between the two time periods increased 7.9% because of the high number of fatalities in 2017 (13) and second lowest VMT in 2015-2019.

Community Maps

If you want to learn more about crashes in the region and in the state, please visit Community Maps. This tool is hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by the Wisconsin Traffic Operations and Safety (TOPS) Laboratory in collaboration with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT).