Safe Streets for All Task Force works to improve safety of roadways
BY KADIE TAYLOR
THE LAFAYETTE SUN
CHAMBERS COUNTY— The Chambers County Commission Safe Streets for All Task Force is collaborating to ensure locals can safely navigate community roads.
“In each meeting, we’ve conducted surveys just within that task force, where their input has been used to develop what we’re calling our High Injury Network and decide our priority projects and our priority corridors that we want to focus on,” said Chambers County Commission County Engineer, Josh Harvill.
The Chambers County Commission has the opportunity to create this task force and work towards safer streets due to funding from a federal grant.
“With this bipartisan infrastructure law, they established several grants that we were able to access directly from the U.S. Department of Transportation at the federal level, and one of those was called the Safe Streets for All program,” Harvill said.
Harvill said after the grant application was funded, he sent invitations to community members who represent a variety of areas for considering community safety, and everyone accepted the invitation.
“We had to go out and invite people to attend, and believe it or not, none of our invitations were turned down,” he said. “Everyone agreed to participate, and it’s been a great process to go through for me. It has been very rewarding and very informative and we’ve had three task force meetings now.”
With the help of the task force, Harvill said that a Safety Action Plan is in the process of being developed.
“We are now in the process of developing our draft Comprehensive Safety Action Plan, and then that will be released to that task force,” he said. “We’re hoping to finalize this and release it to the commission and maybe do some other public engagement in the fall, but we haven’t set any dates for that at this point.”
Harvill said that the goal of the task force and the Comprehensive Safety Action Plan is to lessen roadway accidents.
“Our ultimate goal is to reduce or eliminate injuries, fatal and serious accidents or wrecks on our roadways,” he said. “We want to eliminate those. So the plan is a very aggressive approach, a very detailed and comprehensive approach to that that involves not only road projects and infrastructure improvements, but it also involves what we’re doing with our culture itself in the county.”
One of the ways that the task force is working to change the Chambers County culture surrounding roadways is by investing in educating high schoolers before they begin to drive.
“We are going to the high schools and meeting with the 15-year-olds before they start driving, and talking to them about the dangers of distracted driving,” Harvill said.
Harvill said gathering local leaders to collaborate on ways to improve community safety has helped better the process of making the Comprehensive Safety Action Plan.
“It’s helping us think through it,” he said. “It’s bringing community leaders to the table to think through how we can do a better job. We’re working on this challenge, not only with improvements to our infrastructure but also improvements to the habits and the processes and the procedures.”
