The Speed Management Action Plan (SMAP) characterizes Nevada’s speed and speeding-related safety problems and speed management issues; identifies appropriate engineering, enforcement, and educational countermeasures and strategies; and outlines actions that the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) and partner agencies can take to implement these strategies to reduce speeding and speed-related fatal and serious injury crashes.

The Speed Management Action Plan (SMAP) focuses on developing strategies to improve speed compliance on Nevada’s roadways; Communication and Education, Setting Speed Limits, Plan/Design for Speed Management, Systemic Actions and Strategies in High Crash Corridors, Enforcement and Publicity on High Crash Corridors, Systemic Speed Review within the Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) and Other Safety Programs, and Speed and Speeding-Related Data.

View Nevada's Speed Management Action Plan

Speeding is widespread throughout Nevada. Between 2015 and 2019, there was an average of 175,000 speeding-related citations per year (57% in Clark County, 13% in Washoe County, and 30% in the remaining counties). An alarming trend in Nevada is that speeding-related citations for speeds at or above 100 miles per hour(mph) has been steadily increasing, from 3,517 in 2019 to 5,137 in 2021. This is almost a 50% increase in speed-related citations at or above 100 mph in a two-year period. It is important to note that this is a trend that has been observed throughout the United States and is likely a result of the pandemic and more opportunities for speeding as roads were not as congested.

The Speed Management Action Plan has three basic approaches to the implementation of strategies and counters: proactive, comprehensive, and systematic:

• A proactive approach aims to foster creation of self-enforcing roadway designs appropriate to the land use and user needs (functions of the road) to reduce future speeding and injury risk. The approach aims to develop collaborative and consistent policies, procedures, and safety guidance in speed-limit setting and design for new projects and roadway improvements.
• The overarching objectives of the comprehensive approach are to seek community support for the program, coordinate various stakeholders and engage the community in setting and enforcing appropriate limits, and to complement and enhance the effectiveness of design and engineering measures with locally tailored communications and educational measures.
• A systematic approach is used to identify and coordinate treatment of existing speed and speeding-related safety problems with cost-effective countermeasures (engineering and enforcement-related measures), and to integrate this approach with other safety plans and safety focus areas.

The goals of the SMAP are to reduce fatalities and serious injuries and to improve speed compliance. The primary measures of program effectiveness are safety measures:

• Reduction in speeding-related fatalities to zero by 2050
• Number of actions that are completed 
• Adoption of an NDOT policy to use the Strategies to Achieve Desired Operating Speeds Matrix 
• Number of locations where Strategies to Achieve Desired Operating Speeds Matrix are implemented 
• Reduction in 85th percentile speeds to target speed at locations where countermeasure to Achieve Target Speeds are implemented

The program will be evaluated with respect to changes in crashes, especially fatal and serious injury crashes and speeding-related crashes compared with trends absent the program. Speed measurements provide earlier feedback than crash trends and are a good indicator of safety risk.