U.S. Deportment 

of Transportation 

Federal Highway 

Administration May 26, 2017 

1200 New Jersey Ave., SE 

Washington, D.C. 20590 

An open letter to all in the highway safety hardware and roadside design community: 

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is improving its process for issuing 

Federal-aid eligibility letters for roadside safety hardware systems. The FHWA's 

Federal-aid eligibility letters are provided as a service to the States and are not a 

requirement for roadside safety hardware to be eligible for Federal-aid reimbursement. 

This change focuses the FHW A on analyzing the materials submitted for review, rather 

than addressing the types of crash tests that should be submitted, as the latter are 

determined by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials 

(AASHTO) Manual for Assessing Roadside Safety Hardware (MASH). 

This letter serves to notify you that FHW A is implementing immediate process changes 

as described in this letter. 

Effective immediately, FHW A is implementing the following changes on how requests 

for Federal-aid eligibility letters for roadside safety hardware systems are accepted: 

1. Moving forward, in order for manufacturers and States to qualify for a FHW A 

Federal-aid eligibility letter, all roadside hardware devices must complete the full 

suite of recommended ~ests as described in AASHTO MASH. This applies to: 

a. all devices currently in the FHW A queue that have not received an 

eligibility letter by the effective date of this letter and, 

b. retroactively to requests received after January 1, 2016. 

Manufacturers and States that received an eligibility letter under AASHTO's 

MASH standards and did not run the full suite of tests will be required to run the 

remaining tests in order to retain the Federal-aid eligibility letter. The FHW A has 

contacted the affected manufacturers. These affected parties have up to one year, 

from the date of this letter, to run the balance of crash tests and ·re-submit their 

request for an eligibility letter. A written request, including crash test results from 

an accredited laboratory, must be submitted to FHWA within one year. 

The retroactive date of January 1, 2016, corresponds to the official 

implementation date balloted by AASHTO and the date FHW A began issuing 

Federal-aid eligibility letters using standards from AASHTO's MASH only, i.e., 

when FHWA ceased issuing eligibility letters using National Cooperative 

Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 350 guidance. 
2. FHW A will no longer provide Federal-aid eligibility letters for modifications 

made to an AASHTO MASH-crash tested device. Manufacturers who have 

submitted requests for eligibility letters based on modifications have been 

notified. 

2 

These changes are based on several important factors. The transition from guidance in 

the NCHRP Report 350 to standards in the AASHTO MASH continues per the FHWAAASHTO Implementation Agreement balloted by AASHTO. Since its official launch, 

questions about the AASHTO MASH criteria have been identified by a range of 

stakeholders. Until such time these questions are answered and the transportation 

community has more experience with AASHTO MASH requirements, FHW A will 

require manufacturers and States to run all AASHTO MASH recommended crash tests in 

order to qualify for a FHW A Federal-aid eligibility letter. 

This is a prudent action to support highway safety for the traveling public. This 

opportunity for improvement and consistency was noted in the Government 

Accountability Office's (GAO) final report dated June 2016, "Highway Safety: More 

Robust DOT Oversight of Guardrails and Other Roadside Hardware Could Further 

Enhance Safety," GA0-16-575 and Evaluation ofthe Roadside Safety Hardware Process 

- Prepared for the FHWA's Office of Policy by the John A. Volpe National 

Transportation Systems Center. 

The changes promote efficiency of Federal resources while advancing our Federal role to 

support public safety and ensuring that decision-making is at the State and local level. 

The FHW A will address the initial "entry" of a device into the possibility for Federal-aid 

reimbursement, through examining crash testing, but the final decisions on selection and 

modifications to devices will be at the State and local level. 

States and manufacturers will now have an outstanding opportunity to collaborate and 

deploy manufacturers' innovative modifications in a timely manner and/or respond to 

State-specific needs requiring significant and non-significant modifications - without the 

need of another Federal-aid eligibility letter from FHW A. 

The change helps emphasize that understanding the performance of roadside safety 

hardware begins in a controlled, sterile laboratory environment using crash test scenarios 

and standards set and maintained via AASHTO's MASH. However, laboratory tests 

cannot account for all the variables and situations drivers may encounter. Therefore, 

FHW A continues to encourage States to perform in-service performance evaluations to 

identify real world performance of hardware so all stakeholders have a more 

comprehensive understanding of these devices' performance. 
Thank you in advance for your cooperation in helping FHW A to implement these 

improvements to enhance the safety of roadside hardware. We will notify you of any 

future improvements to the eligibility letter process. For more information, please visit 

our website at 

3 

https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/roadway dept/countermeasures/reduce crash severity/elig pr 

ocess.cfm. 

If you have any questions or comments, please contact Brian Fouch at (202) 366-0744. 

Sincerely yours, 

Elizabeth Alicandri 

Associate Administrator for Safety