Opinion ID: 803993
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Safety Criteria

Text: Finally, Appellants complain briefly that the EIS used the wrong vehicle accident rate metric to calculate the relative safety of each alternative. The EIS’s purpose and need statement used accidents per million vehicle miles driven, but the EIS’s safety analysis used accidents per year. The substantive difference between the two metrics is that accidents per million vehicle miles driven cancels out accident increases created solely by increased highway length, while accidents per year does not. Appellants claim the use of the latter metric in the safety analysis was erroneous given that the former metric was used to define the project’s purpose and need. 2 Although we find the government did not omit these costs from its NEPA analysis, the government admits that it did erroneously omit some costs from its section 4(f) analysis. We address this issue separately below. -19- We find the EIS’s use of accidents per year instead of accidents per million vehicle miles was not arbitrary and capricious. We “are not in a position to decide the propriety of competing methodologies in the transportation analysis context, but instead, should determine simply whether the challenged method had a rational basis and took into consideration the relevant factors.” Comm. to Pres. Boomer Lake Park v. Dep’t of Transp., 4 F.3d 1543, 1553 (10th Cir. 1993). Appellants do not explain why accidents per year lacks a rational basis for NEPA purposes. To us, the total number of accidents that will be caused (or avoided) each year appears a reasonable safety metric, and Appellants do not attempt to convince us otherwise. We note that there is no inherent inconsistency in using accidents per year to evaluate safety, while also using accidents per million vehicle miles as a minimum standard under the purpose and need of the project. The two analyses actually served somewhat different purposes; the safety analysis accounted for accidents avoided due to decreased use of more-dangerous surface streets in Lawrence, while the purpose and need standard considered only the safety of the highway itself, which had to meet or exceed the state average for highways in Kansas. Significantly, Appellants do not claim that alternative 32B would actually fail to meet the purpose and need statement’s minimum standard. Thus, we reject Appellants’ claim that the government failed to rigorously and objectively evaluate road safety. -20-