Regional Safety Action Plan
In 2022, the Met Council completed a Regional Pedestrian Safety Action Plan to analyze pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries and make recommendations to guide effective infrastructure investments and improvements.
As a follow up to that project, the Met Council worked with a consultant team on a Regional Safety Action Plan to help the region address fatalities and serious injuries from vehicle crashes and bicycle-vehicle crashes.
Study goals
This study:
- Analyzed crash and other relevant data;
- Engaged underrepresented communities; and
- Developed recommendations to guide effective infrastructure planning and investments.
The plan’s intent is also to help address requirements in place at the time of the project for federal Safe Streets and Roads for All funding applications. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law created this new discretionary federal funding program with $5 billion over a five-year period from 2022 to 2026. This program funds regional, local, and Tribal work to prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries.
Findings and recommendations
The plan emphasized using a Safe System Approach to eliminate deaths and serious injuries from traffic crashes. This approach involves designing, building, and operating roadways to accommodate mistakes people make and acknowledge our physical vulnerabilities.
This work identified streets in the region with high concentrations of crashes that resulted in fatalities and serious injuries. Known as high-injury streets, they represent 1.8% of the region’s overall road miles, but almost 31% of the fatal and serious injury crashes in the region.
The project also did a proactive analysis to identify road segments and intersections with high-risk characteristics for both drivers and bicyclists. This analysis used the number of travel lanes, posted speed limits, and traffic volumes to create a crash risk Index. The plan identifies the top 25 high-risk corridors and intersections in the region, and up to 10 high-risk corridors in each metro county, based on these data analyses.
A toolkit provides five categories of countermeasures for infrastructure improvements: speed management, pedestrians and bicyclists, roadway departures, intersections, and factors that cross areas.
Programmatic recommendations focus on incorporating safety into all policies, prioritizing safety in funding allocations, using the High Injury Streets and Crash Risk indexes in Metropolitan Council decision making, and providing technical support for local partners.