About Us
The Transportation Safety Training Center was formed in 1971 as a joint venture between the Virginia Highway Safety Division (then Virginia’s Highway Safety Office) and Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Community and Public Affairs. Today, the training center is a division of VCU’s Center for Public Policy.
Working closely with the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, TSTC strives toward its mission “to assist Virginia’s local and state transportation safety agencies and organizations with attaining their transportation safety goals through training, curriculum development and technical assistance.” Well-qualified professionals are essential to successful public safety planning and programming. Through grants from the DMV, TSTC helps provide public safety professionals the necessary training and technical assistance to meet their transportation safety goals.
To achieve its mission, TSTC employs a small staff of transportation safety professionals who work closely with local police and sheriff’s offices, police training academies, highway professionals, fire departments, hospitals and other interested groups to provide up-to-date training and technical assistance in the field of transportation safety.
TSTC annually offers core courses focusing on incident analysis (i.e. motor vehicle crash data collection and analysis). To supplement the courses, TSTC also provides program-related training to ensure the countermeasures resulting from incident analysis are more reliably developed and implemented. Each year, approximately 1,000 people, representing nearly 150 federal, state and local agencies, participate in these workshops, which are taught throughout Virginia.
Supplementing core specific technical assistance, TSTC provides localities with software at no cost to aid them with the analysis of their crash data. The “Micro Traffic Records System” version 6.3 is an analysis system (not a records system) that is widely used throughout Virginia to produce community-level crash profiles. MTRS provides critical element analysis of crash data and stores all data appearing on Virginia’s crash report FR300 (except the diagram) for analysis. MTRS8D, an electronic version of the FR300, also is available.
The Virginia Multi-disciplinary Crash Investigation Team is a unit within TSTC. Comprised of a highway engineer, psychologist and law enforcement professional, VMCIT’s mission is to provide in-depth analyses of motor vehicle crashes in order to produce insights to help steer future reductions in the number of crashes and their severity through highway design, policy development, programming and legislation. Crash team activity has been instrumental in informing legislators regarding safety-related bills, identifying problems and possible solutions for specific roadway issues, and educating law enforcement professionals and the public on highway safety issues.
Since 1979, the TSTC has been the certifying agent for those who escort overdimensional tractor trailer loads traveling the highways of Virginia. A study conducted in the mid-1970s by the Virginia Department of Transportation Research Council determined that overdimensional load escorts were needed, but at the time were often more hazardous than the load itself. As a result of the study, a certification program was developed to ensure uniformity in escort driver knowledge.
For more than 35 years, in classrooms and in the field, the TSTC staff has instructed or assisted hundreds of individuals and organizations throughout the commonwealth. Dedicated to providing state-of-the-art training, technical assistance and curriculum development, the TSTC is recognized nationally for its work in transportation safety.
