Geni Bahar, Summary of Accomplishments

Geni is one of Canada’s outstanding road safety professionals. Her lifetime contributions are many, diverse, and important.

In many Canadian cities and a few in the US ones lives were saved directly by the numerous operational reviews, safety audits and the community traffic studies which she directed.

Another category of contribution are the projects involving system wide safety modeling and network screening. These helped to improve road safety in many states, provinces, regions and metropolitan areas.

Then there are the new tools and methods developed with Geni’s help, under her leadership and with her ingenuity. These enriched and improved the arsenal of the profession. Thus, for example, she co-lead the development of the SafetyAnalyst (for FHWA) which provides a comprehensive review of the road network to enable the selection of the most cost-effective countermeasures. Similarly she also led the development of the highly influential Highway Safety Manual designed to provide information and tools to facilitate roadway design and operational decisions based upon explicit consideration of their safety consequences.

And finally there are policy papers, learned papers published in important journals, manuals to guide practice, as well as course and training materials such as ‘The Science of Highway Safety (for MTO), and ‘New Approaches to Highway Safety Analysis (for FHWA and for the U.S. National Highway Institute).

Important as these reports and documents are, Geni’s contribution goes way beyond. Much of her work and time went to the teaching and training of professionals and thereby promoting the evidence-based delivery of road safety. She taught numerous road safety courses and specialty workshops in Canada and in the US and led the Canadian contribution to the development of ITE‘s program of certification of road safety specialists.

We are all safer due to her work.