Salem Safe Streets for All Action Plan

A Safety Action Plan is a community-specific framework for applying the Safe System Approach. The Salem Safe Streets for All Action Plan is guided by partner agencies, including the City of Salem and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT). For more information about how MassDOT is helping Massachusetts municipalities create comprehensive safety action plans, click the button below.

Safety Action Plans establish a vision and goals for transportation safety, identify safety needs at intersections and streets through data analysis and community input, and then develop projects and strategies to address roadway safety issues. There are eight critical components of a Safety Action Plan, displayed on the right. These are requirements outlined by the Federal Highway Administration. To learn more, click the button below.

Community input is critically important for the Salem Safe Streets for All Action Plan, which is why the City of Salem has created this Story Map to reach a wide cross section of the Salem community.

The Safe System Approach is simple: it is a method for ensuring that everyone can travel on Salem's streets without fear of death or serious injury from a crash. The Safe System Approach focuses on modifying transportation system design to anticipate human errors and lessen impact forces to reduce crash severity and save lives.

Six Safe System principles encompass the fundamental beliefs that the approach is built on:

1. Death and serious injury are unacceptable.
2. Humans make mistakes.
3. Humans are vulnerable.
4. Responsibility is shared.
5. Safety is proactive.
6. Redundancy is crucial.

The Safe System Approach is implemented through five key elements:

1. Safe Roads
2. Safe Vehicles
3. Safe Speeds
4. Safe Road Users
5. Post-Crash Care

The Salem Safe Streets for All Action Plan will incorporate each of the five elements to achieve the plan vision and goals.

Between 2019 - 2023, there were 153 pedestrian crashes and 53 bicycle crashes in Salem. Of these, 2 pedestrian crashes resulted in a fatal injury, and 4 resulted in a suspected serious injury. One bicycle crash resulted in a suspected serious injury.

Additionally:

• 5% of reported crashes involved a pedestrian and 2% involved a bicycle.
• 15% of all reported fatal or suspected serious injury crashes involved a pedestrian.
• Pedestrian-involved crashes tend to be concentrated at intersections in the downtown core.
• Bicycle-involved crashes are substantially more likely to occur at an intersection than pedestrian-involved or motor vehicle-involved crashes.
• Intersections with a high frequency of bicycle-involved crashes are concentrated along collector roads that tend to not have any bicycle facilities.

Addressing the safety concerns of vulnerable road users, including people who walk, bike, and roll, is crucial for the Salem Safe Streets for All Action Plan.

The map on the left shows the intersections that have a high frequency of crashes. A small subset of intersections, generally along the major roadways in Salem, are the locations with the highest crash frequencies. Put another way, 50% of intersection crashes occurred at 6% of intersections in Salem (61 intersections) and 25% of intersection crashes occurred at just 2% of intersections in Salem (18 intersections).

This analysis helps the Safe Streets for All Action Plan identify key locations for systemic safety interventions.

While the analysis described above includes all crash types, it can also be helpful to identify where specific crash types, such as those that impact vulnerable road users like people walking and biking, occur. Click on the buttons below to see high frequency crash intersections for pedestrians or bicyclists.

To differentiate locations with relatively similar numbers of crashes, severity weighted crash frequency was used to understand which locations have, on average, more severe or less severe crash outcomes. The weighting factors were based on the worst reported injury of each crash, to emphasize locations where more serious crash outcomes were reported. These weighting factors included:

• 10x for Fatal and Suspected Serious Injury Crashes
• 5x for Suspected Minor or Possible Injury Crashes
• 1x for Property Damage Only Crashes

The map on the left identifies intersections by the weighted severity associated with each, based on the crashes analyzed between 2019 - 2023. High severity crash intersections tend to cluster around major corridors in Salem. The top intersections are a mix of signalized and unsignalized intersections, and include a high proportion of offset intersections (i.e., two streets align asymmetrically with the intersecting roadway) and complex intersections that include roads intersecting with skew approaches or in a layout with multiple adjacent conflict areas, such as Loring Ave & Canal St or North St & Federal St.

To understand the roadways that are experiencing a high frequency of crashes, a roadway evaluation was conducted that focuses on crashes that occur away from intersections (further than 150 feet from any intersection). In Salem between 2019 - 2023, this included 607 crashes, which was 20% of all reported crashes. The goal of the evaluation is to understand where roadway risk is present, separate from intersection risk. This can include risk of lane departure along curves or risk of crashes along commercial corridors where driveways create potential conflict locations.

In contrast to the  intersection crash screening , weighting crashes by severity resulted in a substantially different screening result for roadways, as displayed in the map to the left.

The top roadway sites (in purple and dark blue) are located on roads designated as arterials and collectors. The roads tend to be located outside of the downtown area, where land uses are less dense. The top ten roadway corridors have speed limits that range from 25 mph to 35 mph. Context varies across the corridors, with some being primarily fronted by residences and others by primarily commercial uses.

Similar to the intersection method, to differentiate roads with relatively similar numbers of crashes, severity weighted crash frequency was used to understand which locations have, on average, more severe or less severe crash outcomes. The weighting factors were based on the worst reported injury of each crash, to emphasize locations where more serious crash outcomes were reported. These weighting factors included:

• 10x for Fatal and Suspected Serious Injury Crashes
• 5x for Suspected Minor or Possible Injury Crashes
• 1x for Property Damage Only Crashes

The map on the left identifies roadways by the weighted severity associated with each, based on the crashes analyzed between 2019 - 2023. High severity crash road segments tend to cluster around major corridors in Salem.

A High Injury Network (HIN) is a prioritized set of corridors that encompass the highest frequency and highest severity crash locations, as well as the locations where community members feel that crash safety is an issue.

In the map on the left, the HIN is shown in two tiers, with each tier representing 25% of fatal and severe crashes. Blue lines represent Tier 1, which includes segments with the highest severity weighted crash frequency. Orange lines represent Tier 2, which includes segments with the next highest severity weighted crash frequency.

The HIN is an important tool for prioritizing safety projects for implementation, and will be used in future phases of the Safety Action Plan to inform the plan's recommendations.

To support the equitable distribution of resources, the federal government created the Justice40 Initiative, which requires that 40% of federal funds are allocated towards disadvantaged communities. For transportation safety projects like the Salem Safe Streets for All Action Plan, it is important to recognize where these disadvantaged communities are (based on available Census data) to account for the cumulative burden communities experience as a result of underinvestment in transportation.