Effectiveness of Increased Law Enforcement Surveillance on Work Zone Safety in Mississippi

Increased law enforcement surveillance program is one of the methods currently been implemented by departments of transportation in the United States in an effort to increase safety for both drivers and workers in highway construction zones. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of studies documenting the impact of this type of programs on construction zone’s safety. Thus, this study summarizes an effort funded by the Mississippi Department of Transportation to quantitatively document the safety impact of increased law enforcement surveillance on highway construction zones in Mississippi. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to determine the safety impact on one construction project. The center of this research project was a construction project located on I-59 in the Jackson (Mississippi) area. The results presented in this paper intend to serve as a sample of the impact of this type of programs. Furthermore, other projects and other departments of transportations might benefit with implementing the analysis presented here as an avenue to quantify the safety impact of increased law enforcement surveillance in construction zones.