Crash Trends
Roadway safety data trends in Erie and Niagara County are moving in the wrong direction. Every week since 2019, one person has died in a motor vehicle crash and nearly twenty people have suffered serious injuries. Roadway fatalities, in proportion to the vehicle miles traveled, in the region have increased compared to the rest of the state.
This Plan will bring together agencies involved in transportation safety with community groups and subject matter experts to identify locations where motor vehicle crashes are more likely to occur, then recommend strategies on how to reduce fatality and injury rates.
Is there a framework guiding the Plan’s development?
New York State has adopted the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Safe Systems Approach to address roadway safety. This approach begins with the assumption that no fatality or serious injury is acceptable and that all crashes are preventable. All stakeholders – roadway designers, transportation providers, and travelers – have a shared responsibility in making the transportation system as safe as possible.
The Plan will focus on priority locations, priority groups, and priority strategies. In pursuit of this, the New York Strategic Highway Safety Plan has identified seven Emphasis Areas to prioritize for crash reduction. These represent a wide-range of crash types, roadway users, vehicles, and behaviors.
How will the Plan be used?
The Safety Implementation Program at GBNRTC will develop a comprehensive list of previously proposed, and new projects and strategies from the Plan to improve transportation safety across the Erie-Niagara region.
The Program will include approaches from across the 4 E’s of safety:
Engineering
Enforcement
Education
Emergency Response
How can we track the Plan’s implementation?
The Implementation Program Annual Report will track action items the member agencies and other partners will undertake to improve safety in the region.
Performance measures for each action will be identified to allow all stakeholders and the public to track efforts related to the actions.
The Annual Report will coincide with NYSDOT’s Highway Safety Improvement Program Annual Report and submission of performance targets to the Federal Highway Administration.
Priority Safety Network
The project team, in consultation with local jurisdictions and NYSDOT-Region 5, will overlay the results of the crash data analysis process with other roadway and area data to develop a comprehensive Priority Safety Network. The network is intended to be a synthesized set of priority corridors and intersections that will be the focus of future implementation efforts of the Comprehensive Roadway Safety Action Plan. This could include both near-term investigations and corridors studies or long-term capital projects.
The figure below illustrates the data that will be overlaid to create the draft Priority Safety Network. The project team will work with the Safety Advisory Group to review the criteria, scoring, and weights to be used to calculate a single index value.
Priority Safety Network Factors
