Overview
In 2010 and 2011, safety staff with FHWA and the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) analyzed 110 wrong-way crashes that occurred on the Michigan freeway system during the 5-year period from 2005 to 2009. What they found regarding the characteristics of wrong-way drivers corroborated earlier studies, but what they found regarding the road system shed new light on the roadway engineering aspect of wrong-way freeway entries.
The safety researchers restricted their study to vehicles that were known or presumed to have entered the freeway system by traveling the wrong direction on an exit ramp. The team made every effort to exclude cross-median and other crashes in which a vehicle was traveling the wrong way by virtue of the driver losing control of the vehicle. Thus, an accurate description of the incidents researched in this study would be "wrong-way freeway entry" crashes.