Overview
Roanoke County was awarded a grant through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) Discretionary Grant Program to develop a Comprehensive Safety Action Plan. The SS4A program aims to help communities enhance safety by significantly reducing roadway-related fatalities and serious injuries.
Timmons Group has provided data analysis for the top 10 corridors and top 10 intersection locations within each locality based on fatal and serious injury crashes. Using the information from the GIS safety analysis, Timmons Group created community engagement efforts online and in-person to review whether the data captured all areas. Further recommendations were created for the top locations in each locality to garner support for innovative intersections and other improvements that have faced public scrutiny. The crash risk data from the four maps generated by the usRAP analysis was combined to assign each roadway a single risk score.
The result is a High-Injury Network ranking every roadway in Roanoke County. The High-Injury Network (HIN) is a collection of streets and roadways where a disproportionate number of severe car crashes, resulting in fatalities or serious injuries, occur. While increasing safety is important on every street, identifying a HIN assists local leaders in focusing their efforts on improvements on areas that will have the greatest impact and save the most lives. Community engagement and feedback played a critical role in ensuring the development of the Action Plan was done using an inclusive and representative process.
Community engagement for the initiative included holding community meetings, gathering survey responses, and distributing project information through local news campaigns, social media marketing, and online resources (StoryMaps and interactive dashboards). The project team also routinely collaborated with an identified stakeholder group, that consisted of representatives from VDOT, local police, fire, and emergency response, the Town of Vinton, Roanoke County Public Schools, and other Roanoke County departments.
