Speaking

Nicole will be presenting alongside Victoria Berrett, Transportation Planner for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), to provide MPOs with ideas to establish successful regional safety programs.

With the first round of the Safe Streets for All grants submitted, more MPOs than ever are preparing to plan or implement safety programs. Over the last couple years, the crash trends have been flat or rising. To get started on the right foot with this new infusion of funds and develop a safety program that leads to severe crash reductions, agencies need to move away from business as usual.

For a safety program to be successful, several elements need to be considered and addressed first.

This includes leadership, agency culture, agency to agency collaboration, agency to stakeholder collaboration, public support and buy-in, data collection and availability, and supporting policies. A lack of consensus and collaboration on these topics can set an agency up to fail in building a safety practice and later implementation efforts. Nicole Waldheim with Burgess & Niple will discuss two recent safety assessments which guided a City and an MPO through an evaluation of their existing safety program to re-think how they can reduce severe crashes. She will discuss this and provide an example from a local agency who used the Safe System Approach to develop a recent Comprehensive Safety Action Plan (CSAP).

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) has been building their regional transportation safety program, now called the Safe and Complete Streets Program. The program is designed to address the growing number of traffic fatalities, including those happening among bicyclists and pedestrians. They are increasing the scope of safety work by adding key elements like equitable stakeholder engagement and coordination, safety policy advancement, speed management, and transportation safety project implementation, to reduce severe crashes in the region. Victoria Barrett with CMAP will highlight the process and steps to start a regional safety program at an MPO and discuss specific examples for how an MPO can implement their safety practice and move towards improving the culture of safety at the regional level.