NACOG Regional Transportation Safety Plan

The Northern Arizona Regional Transportation Safety Plan (RTSP) is a planning effort of Northern Arizona Council of Governments (NACOG) seeking to reduce the risk of death and serious injury on roadways.

This plan utilizes vehicle crash data between 2017-2021, stakeholder and public input, and other roadway condition data to ensure all required elements of a Safety Action Plan are met as defined in the Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) Federal grant program.

Safe streets and roads are the foundation of a livable region. When people step out their front door, they expect and deserve a safe way to get where they’re going, whether it’s walking or bicycling in the neighborhood, getting to transit, or driving down a highway.

Why is roadway safety important? By analyzing and addressing potential roadway hazards, implementing effective traffic management strategies, and improving infrastructure, safety planning efforts like the Northern Arizona Regional Transportation Safety Plan reduce the number of crashes, injuries, and fatalities.

In the last 5 years (2017-2021), the NACOG region had over 25,000 crashes that led to 1579 serious injuries and 680 deaths. The Regional Transportation Safety Plan provides a regionally-focused, data-driven framework for increasing traffic safety on roadways in the northern Arizona region. The Plan focuses on strategies and actions drawn from best practices proven to reduce traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. Our vision is zero deaths.

The NACOG region's crash data trends were analyzed as part of the Regional Transportation Safety Plan effort, helping to locate persistent problem areas, identify problematic crash behaviors and roadway conditions that contribute toward crashes, and gauge success of locations where safety improvements have already been installed. A full analysis of crash data is included in the  full Regional Transportation Safety Plan.  The charts below show a summary of relevant safety-related trends for the northern Arizona area.

Figure 2 (right) shows the total number of crashes for each year between 2017 and 2021. While the table displays a statistical downward trend in the total annual number of crashes, note that 2020 is an outlier year that experienced a significantly lower number of crashes due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 3 (below) breaks down observed crashes by the severity of injury reported. This attribute is exceedingly important in identifying locations in greatest need of safety improvement.

Crashes during the 2017-2021 period were also categorized by their crash manner, a metric which captures the angles at which the incident occurs - results are displayed in the table below. Crash manner analysis helps further characterize dangerous situations on northern Arizona roadways and serves as another step toward mitigating those conditions. The crash type and manner is often linked to the severity of the incident; for example, head on crashes tend to be the most dangerous while sideswipe accidents see less severe injuries.

The RTSP data analysis, public involvement efforts, and ongoing planning have resulted in the identification of a set of fourteen different safety emphasis areas. After careful review, NACOG has adopted seven of the identified safety emphasis areas where particular attention should be paid by jurisdictions when identifying and implementing safety improvements:

These safety emphasis areas guided the identification of priority projects, and will continue to influence policy guidance going forward. Crashes were analyzed and categorized within these emphasis areas (a single crash may be identified as contributing to more than one emphasis area, as a crash may have had multiple factors associated, e.g. a lane departure crash where speeding and not wearing a seat belt were observed).

The Regional Transportation Safety Plan effort has also resulted in a robust set of broader, network-wide safety strategies and policy recommendations, including the following examples:

The full extent of the safety strategies and policy improvements is accessible in the  full Regional Transportation Safety Plan document , available on the NACOG website. Below, you'll find an interactive map of recommended safety priority projects, developed using a weighted combination of the safety emphasis areas, Arizona Department of Transportation 2017-2021 crash data, and comments from stakeholders and the public.

Please direct any questions, concerns, or other comments to Jennifer O'Connor (joconnor@nacog.org), NACOG Planning Director. Additional information, including the full RTSP document, can be accessed on  the NACOG website.