MRPC/MART Safety Action Plan
The Montachusett Regional Planning Commission (MRPC) in collaboration with the Montachusett Regional Transit Authority (MART) and the agencies’ consultant team WSP are partnering with the region’s communities to undertake a Safety Action Plan to improve roadway safety outcomes in North-Central Massachusetts. This effort, which will be coordinated with abutting regional planning councils and transit providers, aims to significantly reduce or eliminate roadway fatalities and serious injuries by transforming how the system is designed, operated, and managed through the application of a Safe System approach and the implementation of Vision Zero principles.
What Is Vision Zero?
The goal of Vision Zero is to eliminate roadway fatalities and serious injuries by moving to a roadway system that integrates multiple, redundant layers of safeguards so that unavoidable human errors are accommodated, and life-altering crashes avoided. The Vision Zero approach rests on self-enforcing designs which seek to limit the speed of vehicles in a crash and utilizing data-driven insights to identify and proactively address high-risk areas. Unlike traditional approaches to roadway safety, which also account for incidents with damage to vehicles only, this analytical lens focuses on reducing the consequences of the most severe crashes and curbing the preventable impacts of roadway tragedies.
Vision Zero is based on a shared responsibility between system designers and users to change the safety culture on the road and has generated significant reductions in roadway tragedies across the globe, with potential to make a strong impact in the United States. By collaborating with community members and leveraging new data-driven analytic methods, the project team will work to uncover the root causes of crashes, identify the areas of highest risk, and develop broad strategies – policies and educational efforts and a prioritized list of projects that will produce a safer transportation system for all users.
How Did We Get Here?
The Safe Streets for All (SS4A) Grant Program, established under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), allocated $5 billion to be distributed towards enhancing roadway safety outcomes over a five-year period (2022 to 2026). This funding supports the MRPC Safety Action Plan – one of multiple such efforts being undertaken throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and across the United States.
