Older Driver Safety: Survey of States on Their Implementation of Federal Highway Administration Recommendations and Guidelines (GAO-07-517SP), an E-supplement to GAO-07-413

This is the companion product to GAO-07-413. This document presents selected results of GAO's survey of the departments of transportation (DOT) in 50 states and the District of Columbia to obtain information on the extent to which states have implemented practices to make roads safer for older drivers. The questions in our survey were posed to obtain information on the extent to which states have incorporated Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) recommendations to design roads with features to enhance safety for older drivers, reasons for state DOTs rejecting FHWA recommendations, the proportion of practitioners that have been trained in state DOTs to implement FHWA recommendations, and the extent to which states have developed plans and programmed projects for older driver safety. The survey was e-mailed to DOT officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and we obtained a response from each of the survey recipients. We do not include responses for all survey questions. Specifically, this document does not include narrative responses that we received. Additionally, this document does not contain responses to questions 4 and 6 because many states did not answer these questions, and the responses we did receive were difficult to present consistently and accurately because some states supplemented their responses with qualifications or explanations. A more detailed discussion of our scope and methodology is contained in our report Older Driver Safety: Knowledge Sharing Should Help States Prepare for Increase in Older Driver Population, GAO-07-413 (Washington, D.C.: April 2007). We administered the survey from September 2006 through January 2007 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.