pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Dongho Chang, City Traffic Engineer, City of Seattle, moderates the Transportation Agency Panel

The PacTrans Region 10 Transportation Safety Workshop on May 5 drew representatives from universities, public agencies, and private companies across the Pacific Northwest to discuss important regional transportation safety issues. This workshop was jointly organized by PacTrans, ITE Washington, ITE Oregon, ITE Idaho, and ITE Alaska. Open only to invited participants, more than 70 attendees, both in-person and online, joined the workshop at the Talaris Conference Center to identify critical regional transportation safety issues for PacTrans to study. Regional transportation experts representing industry, agency, and university perspectives contributed to PacTrans’ research agenda, shared ongoing efforts in addressing critical safety problems, and solidified partnerships in transportation safety research and practice.

The morning sessions included keynote talks on transportation safety priorities at federal and state levels from Kenneth Feldman, Federal Transit Administration (FTA), and Chris Madill, Washington Traffic Safety Commission (WTSC), respectively. From a national standpoint, Feldman explained the FTA’s vision to make safe transportation safer and to see safety management systems (SMS) embedded in every transit agency. As executive director of WTSC, Madill outlined Target Zero, which aims for zero deaths and serious injuries on roadways by 2030, and highlighted key issues including motorcycles and pedestrians.

The transportation agency panel, moderated by Dongho Chang, City of Seattle, was comprised of representatives from Washington State Department of Transportation, Idaho Transportation Department, City of Portland, and Alaska Department of Transportation. Common threads throughout the panel included prioritization of decreasing vehicle run off the road crashes, communicating effective safety messages with the public, and the importance of enforcement.

Carlos Ortiz, ITE Western District President, moderated the ITE panel with representatives from the City of Seattle, Toole Design Group, and Leidos. While covering a range of topics, conversational themes emerged on more and better data for vulnerable users, such as bicyclists and pedestrians, and regulatory and societal trends with safety implications.

To address specific research and education needs, the final session placed participants into several working groups to concentrate separately on safe infrastructure, safe users, and safe operations. The safe operations group identified pedestrian risk locations and behaviors as a top priority, as well as acquiring data on speed, research on bicycle improvements, and collision data. Among the priorities outlined by the safe infrastructure group, effectiveness of measures to reduce collisions, a template for collection and analysis of collisions, implications of measures on all users, and high-tech solutions for managing risk to lifelines ranked in the top four. Finally, the safe users group cited defining the tipping point of bicycle usage, data acquisition, changing user demographics in transportation, and the notion of designing transportation facilities to elicit safer operating speeds as vital issues for research in the region.

With this information and support, PacTrans is equipped to continue investing in high-impact transportation safety research for the Pacific Northwest.