Spokane Regional Safety Action Plan
one crash, many lives
Spokane Regional Safety Action Plan
The impact of a single crash ripples out far beyond the immediate impact. Crash victims and their loved ones lose time from work, are burdened with medical expenses, struggle with trauma and grief, and live with the victim’s temporary or permanent disability. People who witnessed the crash can be profoundly affected. And the guilt of being responsible for a crash can last a lifetime.
A single fatal or serious crash can rock an entire community. It takes an entire community, and a coordinated plan, to end fatal and serious crashes.
Scroll down to learn more about the plan and how community feedback informed actions and strategies to help make our roadways safer.
You will find us at the Asian Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Festival on May 11th.
For more background on the plan and crash data, please visit SRTC Regional Safety Action Plan Introduction from April 2024 or the SRTC main page. https://www.srtc.org/rsap/
Zoom and pan inside the map and click on a crash to view details.
Introduction
The Spokane Regional Transportation Council (SRTC) is the lead agency for this safety action plan. SRTC and its member agencies have already taken actions and identified specific projects to help people get home safely, but more remains to be done. To align with its stated mission, vision, and values, SRTC is committed to achieving zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries on all public roads.
What We Heard
Because this plan affects people from diverse backgrounds in both urban and rural areas, it was important for SRTC to gather as many different perspectives as possible. SRTC’s team met not just with local agency representatives but also with people waiting at bus stops, and people of all ages visiting their local libraries.
Our team heard valuable feedback from some of our most vulnerable populations, including older adults, unhoused people, teenagers, and people living with disabilities.
ArcGIS Dashboards
Emphasis Areas
Getting People Home Safely
The crash characteristics most associated with fatal and severe-injury crashes in Spokane County—such as crash type, behavior, or road design—are reflected in these emphasis areas. By using them as a lens for collaboration regionwide, we can achieve zero fatalities and severe injuries on our roadways.
Targeted Corridors
The High Injury Network (HIN) identifies the highest concentrations of traffic crashes resulting in serious injuries and fatalities on a given roadway network.
For the Spokane region, the HIN includes stretches of roadways and intersections where the highest number of serious and fatal injuries occurred over the most recent five years of available crash data at the time of publishing (2018 – 2022). It also includes agency and community input to indicate areas of concern.
An HIN is not an assessment of whether a street or location is dangerous; instead, an HIN suggests which corridors have historically had a higher risk of injury. This helps communities focus resources on improving safety along these corridors.
High Priority Network
Many communities have zero or very few fatal and serious injury crashes. In these communities, a High Priority Network (HPN) has been identified. These are corridors and intersections that carry a higher risk of injury based on:
- Total number of all crashes (2018 –2022)
- Land use and roadway characteristics, including pedestrian activity to access community destinations
- Local input
Proactively addressing HPN roadway characteristics, including speed management and improved pedestrian crossings, will help prevent future fatal and serious injury crashes.
Example Actions We Can Take
Below are some examples of strategies that are being developed to improve safety on our roadways. Reducing speed is an overarching principle in many of the strategies and actions to reduce crash risk for all modes.
Construction on Roadways
- Continue to implement crossing enhancements at signalized intersections and mid-block crossings on the HIN in disadvantaged areas with an emphasis on locations near transit stops where applicable.
- Consider roundabouts at intersections with a high frequency of reported collisions.
- Install guardrails on HIN to provide a safety barrier.
- Continue to include measures in roadway designs to slow traffic and separate pedestrians and cyclists from vehicles.
Policies and Programs
- Increase the use of red-light running cameras at signalized intersections on the top crash locations.
- Evaluate the need for speed management strategies, such as speed feedback signs and rumble strips ahead of severe curves for improvements on HIN.
- Conduct a Lighting Screening Study on HIN corridors where dark/unlit conditions are an observed crash type to identify potential solutions.
Education
- Develop and implement an education and outreach campaign focused on safety with emphasis in the following areas:
- Distracted and impaired driving
- Speeding, particularly for motorcyclists
- Vulnerable user groups, including pedestrians, cyclists, and youth
Provide Feedback
Microsoft Forms
