How a Traffic Safety Evaluation Can Help Improve Your City’s Roads

Does your city have streets or intersections that you consider problematic areas—streets where drivers are frequently caught speeding or intersections where accidents frequently occur? You may even have an area where traffic tends to build up, and no matter what you do, you can’t seem to get traffic to flow properly. These are common problems for cities and counties, but they aren’t problems that you have to live with forever. If you’re having trouble coming up with a solution, you should consider having a traffic safety evaluation completed.

Who Conducts Traffic Safety Evaluations?

Typically, traffic safety evaluations aren’t conducted by random city employees. In order to get a new perspective, you need the help of safety experts. In most cases, a traffic engineer and a traffic enforcement expert should work together to analyze the situation and come up with a good solution to the problem.

What Happens During a Traffic Safety Evaluation?

Your safety experts visit your city for a couple of days to observe traffic patterns in your problematic areas. Once the evaluation is complete, the experts will present you with their findings, along with on-site engineering and enforcement recommendations that you can use to help create a plan of action.

What Happens After the Evaluation?

Once you have the recommendations from the safety experts, you need to create a plan of action. If there are engineering suggestions that your city wants to make, you’ll need to review your city’s budget to determine when the work can be completed. Keep in mind, that while the safety experts recommend specific solutions, it may not be feasible to complete engineering work on your roads right away.

In order to create a plan of action to help enforce speed limits, etc. You need to consult your city’s police department. Work with the department to create an enforcement schedule. The more police patrol the area, the less likely drivers are to speed—eventually drivers will come to recognize the street and/or streets as areas police cars frequently sit and the amount of drivers caught speeding should decrease.

Traffic safety evaluations aren’t concrete solutions to your problems, but they are valuable. By bringing experts in to evaluate problematic areas and provide you with recommendations, it’s easier to create a plan of action that will work for your city. As long as you take the necessary steps to put your plan in place, it shouldn’t take long to see results. 

Control Street Flooding with Sewer, Drywell, and Manhole Maintenance

As the winter months approach, it’s important to think about how your city’s streets will be affected. Snow and ice on its own can cause an extensive amount of damage to asphalt, but that shouldn’t be your only concern. As the weather begins to get warmer next spring, the snow and ice will thaw, and if it the water doesn’t have anywhere to go, it could potentially flood the street. Your city probably has a sewer system or runoffs to keep water off of residential streets, and the time to make repairs is now—before the weather turns cold.

Create a Plan

Before you send out street crews to excess the sewer system and manholes throughout the city, you need to create a plan of attack. Not all manholes need to be replaced, and most of your city’s sewer systems probably work fine. So, spend some time reviewing information that you have on the streets themselves.

• Have residents reported consistent street flooding throughout the spring and summer?
• Are there streets in your city that gather large pools of water each time it rains?
• Are there streets that don’t have access to your city’s sewer system? And, if so, do those streets have proper run-offs?

By reviewing the information that you have on hand, it’s easy to determine where your problem areas are—these are the areas where you should start your street inspections.

Inspection and Maintenance

Once you’ve determined which streets need immediate attention, schedule rounds of inspections and maintenance. It’s important to schedule the work during early fall—if you put it off and winter starts early, you might not be able to get the job done.

Have your street crews inspect manhole covers to ensure that they fit properly—and replace them if needed. They should also inspect the sewer system to make sure there isn’t anything blocking water from entering the grates.

If your city uses drywells to control storm water, your street crews need to inspect the grates frequently throughout the fall season. Typically, the land around the drywell grate is slightly sloped so that the storm water flows into the grate, preventing the street from flooding. However, leaves, twigs, and pine needles can get stuck in the grates and the water can’t enter the drywell. While cleaning the grates is important throughout the year, it’s especially important during the fall season when the leaves fall off the trees.

Ultimately, clearing grates and performing routine maintenance on sewer systems and manholes isn’t a task that you want your road crews to perform in the winter. By scheduling inspections, maintenance, and routine grate cleanings now, you’ll save yourself—and your residents—a lot of hassle next spring.

Don’t Pollute! Control Pollution by Planning Ahead for Road, Highway, and Bridge Work

While pollution may not be the first thing that crosses your mind when you’re creating a plan for upcoming road work, it should definitely be one of the top concerns on your list. Roads, highways, and bridges can be a source of a significant amount of pollution to your city’s water—so if you aren’t careful, you’re planning could create future problems. By taking possible runoff points into consideration during the planning process, it’s easy to prevent and control the runoff pollution in your local area.

Planning for New Construction

When you’re developing a grid for new streets, highways, or bridges, you need to take the surrounding land into consideration. In order to prevent unwanted pollution:

• Try to incorporate your road system or bridge into the natural characteristics of the landscape.
• Avoid building new roads, highways, and bridges where they will have a direct impact on nearby bodies of water.
• As you’re planning for your city to expand, reserve specific portions of land for roads, highways, and bridges. If you don’t allocate the land ahead of time, it’s more likely that roads, highways, and bridges will be built on whatever land is available—by controlling this, you control the amount of runoff pollution in your town.

New Construction

With the amount of Earth you’re disturbing to build new highways, bridges, and roads, it’s normal to have some runoff pollution. However, just because it’s normal, doesn’t mean that you should ignore it. Instead, develop a plan that helps you control the amount of runoff pollution created during the construction phase.

• Develop a site-specific erosion and sediment control plan
• Monitor chemical usage
• Control how chemicals are handled and stored on the construction site
• Fertilize the land you disturb to promote vegetation growth so that runoff debris isn’t flowing directly into a water source 

Routine Maintenance and Operation

You also have ample opportunity to inspect the area around your roads, bridges, and highways throughout the year to make sure your runoff points aren’t causing excess pollution. Create a regular schedule that includes:

• Seeding and fertilizing areas with damaged vegetation or slopes
• Clean drainage ditches
• Keep the shoulders and slopes of your roads clear of litter and other debris
• Regulate the amount of deicing salts used on your city’s roads to prevent over deicing
• Make sure your city’s salt trucks are equipped with calibration devices so that the salt is spread evenly