Special to IFN
The Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization (CRTPO) was awarded $3.15 million through the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) Discretionary Grant program last September.
On September 4, the CRTPO was authorized to begin the use of these funds for its safety planning efforts.
“As we all know with grant applications in our communities, the work is not easy, and all of this grant application was done in house at a huge savings to our region,” CRTPO Board Chair and Mooresville Commissioner Lisa Qualls said during the September Board Meeting. “We’re excited to be a leader in our region for transportation (and) we want to do everything possible to avoid those (serious) crashes.”
Safety is Everyone’s Business: A Comprehensive Safety Action Plan
In 2024, the CRTPO planning area experienced 21,318 crashes with injuries, including 205 fatal crashes. The CRTPO’s SS4A grant application, titled “Safety is Everyone’s Business,” will engage all 24 member jurisdictions to create a Comprehensive Safety Action Plan (CSAP) to establish a regional vision for achieving a reduction of these serious traffic injuries and fatalities on the region’s transportation network.
The study will develop a new regional High Injury Network tool to identify corridors and intersections with high crash rates in need of traffic safety enhancements across the CRTPO’s 24 member jurisdictions. A predictive risk analysis will identify roads with contributing crash factors, like poor visibility and lacking pedestrian crossings, to recommend improvements before crashes happen. Road safety audits will send teams to specific roadway and transit sites to further evaluate data findings on the ground.
These findings and recommendations will be compiled into a final Safety Action Plan, including phased strategies for investing in safety solutions, and local Safety Action Plans for each member community.
This work will be overseen by a Transportation Safety Task Force and reviewed by members of the community at public events and with a community advisory panel.
The CRTPO will embed findings and recommendations from the study into its ongoing work to program and fund transportation projects with regional significance, ensuring the transportation system is modernized to meet population growth and the prevalence of multimodal travel.
About SS4A Grants
The Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) Discretionary Grant program funds projects to plan, demonstrate, and implement transportation safety improvements to prevent deaths and serious injuries on American roadways. SS4A requires an eligible Comprehensive Safety Action Plan be in place before a community can apply for capital funding to implement projects. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law created this multibillion-dollar grant program and adopted the National Roadway Safety Strategy to take a holistic view of how user behavior, infrastructure condition and design, and incident response influence safe transportation outcomes.
About CRTPO
The CRTPO is the federally designated metropolitan planning organization for the Charlotte urban area, which includes Iredell, Mecklenburg, and the urban portion of Union County. More information about the organization is available on the CRTPO website at www.crtpo.org.