Challenge
The City of San Pablo, CA is a relatively small city that is land-locked by other municipalities in the East Bay. Its small geography and population as made it challenging, historically, for the City to successfully earn grant funding, particularly Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) grant funding. In order to invest in improvements that will reduce the risk of crashes for all of their road users, the City, with assistance from a systemic safety analysis report program grant from Caltrans, is working towards developing competitive projects for grants that will enhance their community.
Solution
Kittelson applied a systemic safety analysis approach to identify locations with a history of severe crashes, as well as roadway and land use characteristics that could be contributing to or correlated with the severe crashes.
Using the outcome of that analysis, the team identify priority locations for safety investments to address locations that have experienced severe crashes in the past, as well as locations with the characteristics correlated with those severe crashes.
The Outcome
A List of Safety Projects Grant-Makers Can Get Behind
Kittelson worked with the City of San Pablo to develop a spreadsheet and GIS-based mapping tool to evaluate their entire street network and to identify:
- Priority locations for investments based on crash history and risk factors;
- Systemic treatments that could be used at multiple locations to reduce crash risk; and
- Specific locations and improvements that are most likely to be competitive for grant funding.
