Arkansas Highway Safety Office

The Arkansas Highway Safety Office (AHSO) at the Division of Arkansas State Police is tasked with the simple but difficult mission to eradicate preventable crash fatalities, serious injuries, and economic losses on Arkansas roadways. We seek to effectively administer federal highway safety grant funds from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and oversee statewide behavioral highway safety programs and projects to save lives and reduce injuries on the State’s roads.

Additionally, we provide leadership, innovation and program support to our State’s agencies and law enforcement in partnership with traffic safety advocates, professionals and organizations.

Some of the highway safety program efforts supported by these funds for the State of Arkansas are featured below:

WHAT IS ZERO DEATHS PROGRAM?

Every life is valuable. We at the Arkansas Highway Safety Office don’t want the lives that expired on Arkansas highways this year to become just another set of numbers added to our year end statistics. These lives lost in crashes in many cases are 100% preventable. Our goal is Zero Deaths on the roadways of Arkansas and, the goal for every individual, every family, and every community should be zero deaths on Arkansas roads.

That’s why the Arkansas State Police Highway Safety Office, the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department and the Arkansas Department of Health are working with other partners across the state through the Toward Zero Deaths program to eliminate traffic fatalities.

The ultimate goal of the program is to strive for zero fatalities on Arkansas roadways. This goal supports the Toward Zero Deaths National Strategy on Highway Safety. To reach this goal, the Arkansas Strategic Highway Safety Plan identified key safety areas. The plan integrates education, enforcement, enrollment, engineering and emergency services. The primary goal of the Arkansas Strategic Highway Safety Plan is to reduce the annual number of roadway fatalities in Arkansas from 500 to 400 or less by 2022.

This year: 359 crash deaths occurred on Arkansas roads.

_{*Preliminary Data – Fatalities as of August 11, 2021}

With the goal of Zero Deaths in mind, the Arkansas Highway Safety Office coordinates a statewide behavioral highway safety program making effective use of federal and state highway safety funds and other resources to save lives and reduce injuries on the state’s roads, and provide leadership, innovation and program support in partnership with traffic safety advocates, professionals and organizations. Featured Programs addressing high fatalities on Arkansas roadways are Impaired Driving and Occupant Protection…^{For more Arkansas Crash Data https://www.dps.arkansas.gov/dashboard/}

• IMPAIRED DRIVING

Every day, about 28 people in the United States die in drunk-driving crashes — that’s one person every 52 minutes. In 2019, these deaths reached the lowest percentage since 1982 when NHTSA started reporting alcohol data — but still 10,142 people lost their lives. These deaths were all preventable.

10142 deaths from drunk driving crashes in 2019*

_{*Source: Overview of the 2019 Crash Investigation Sampling System (dot.gov)}

FEATURED COMMERCIAL FROM DSGPO CAMPAIGN

Click here for more on Impaired Driving

OTHER FEATURED PROGRAMS

Occupant Protection

Speeding

Ped/Bicycle