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.