Safer Roads for all roadway users means Safer Neighborhoods.

LEE worked alongside ODOT Traffic Engineering personnel to design wrong way counter measures for more than 90 ramps along I-35 from Logan County to Kay County in District 4. Wrong way warning systems utilizing wrong way vehicle detection and activated LED signs were included as safety improvements designed to deter potential wrong way drivers and create a safer interstate highway corridor. Additional improvements included improved signing, pavement markings, and delineators for all ramps and enhanced mile markers and delineators along the I-35 mainline.

As a result of a statewide safety needs assessment, the City of Truth or Consequences was selected for a Regional Transportation Safety Plan through the NMDOT’s Highway Safety Improvement Program. This Multimodal Transportation Safety Plan focused on three primary pedestrian areas within Truth or Consequences. The project team collaborated with NMDOT District 1, Sierra County Road Department, the City of Williamsburg, and community stakeholders. The community’s safety vision was to improve roadway safety through increased vehicle speed limit compliance, suitable pedestrian facilities, accessibility, striping and signage, and reducing intersection conflicts. Our team proposed countermeasures which included efforts to calm traffic, improve pedestrian accessibility, ADA compliance, and better communication of roadway conditions.

This study included approximately 7.75 miles of SH-33 from SH-74 east to N 19th Street in Guthrie, OK. The study addressed safety concerns due to the collision history of the corridor and provided numerous recommendations for safety improvements. The traffic safety study included field reconnaissance, capacity analysis, sight distance evaluations, turn lane analysis, detailed collision analysis, speed and passing zone evaluations, access management assessment, and an array of recommendations for safety enhancements.

A 2019 network screening of non-interstate NMDOT maintained routes identified the corridor of Coors Boulevard between Blake and Gun Club Roads as having a high rate of pedestrian deaths. Between 2015 and 2019, there were seven pedestrian-involved crashes. Tragically, four were fatal. As a result, a Road Safety Audit (RSA) was prompted. The Coors RSA team comprised 20 professionals from multiple agencies, including NMDOT, Bernalillo County, the City of Albuquerque, and the Mid-Region Council of Governments. Our team understands the value of the experience, perspectives, and insights that working with such a diverse and knowledgeable team can bring to identifying safety challenges and improving roadway safety for all road users. As a result, Lee coordinated the above agencies in performing RSA activities such as meeting to introduce the study, conducting multiple field reviews, meeting to discuss the findings and recommended safety countermeasures, and reviewing the final RSA report. After the publishing of the final report, the region was able to secure $6.5 million in funding to implement the recommended safety solutions.

Records from TxDOT’s CRIS (Crash Record Information System) database were used to prepare trend charts & summary tables for various items: multi-year crash trends by severity, collision type, intersection, time period, and the involvement of pedestrians, cyclists, & alcohol; economic cost of crashes; single-year trends; and, top 20 signalized intersections by crash frequency, rate, and EPDO. An explanatory narrative was provided to accompany charts and tables. City-provided traffic volume estimates were used to calculate intersection crash rates. A summary document was prepared, including charts and maps.

Lee Engineering assisted the City of Frisco with developing a workflow to have up-to-date records from monthly CRIS imports into pre-existing software that provides a map and table interface for browsing records. Because some of the Frisco city limits are on the centerlines of roadways, an expanded buffer was needed to ensure the inclusion of all relevant crashes. However, there was no pre-existing characteristic within CRIS data that could be used as a boundary condition. Therefore, Lee Engineering created a model for use in ArcGIS that could filter crashes located in Frisco and adjacent cities to those within Frisco and a 1/8th mile buffer region.

TxDOT does not include vehicular prior action descriptions in CRIS. Therefore, meaningful intersection collision diagrams cannot be made without enriching the dataset by reading the officer’s narrative, viewing the crash illustration, judging which vehicle’s prior actions are applicable, and entering these actions into the database of records. For instance, knowing that a collision included vehicles in opposing directions, with one turning left and the other going straight, is not enough information to know which vehicle was making the left turn. Without this information, engineers cannot identify improvement opportunities.

Lee Engineering identified software that could perform zonal OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on CR‑3 PDFs to extract the crash narrative as plain text. Crash narrative import enabled the City of Frisco to assign prior actions to all vehicles – thereby enabling the generation of meaningful collision diagrams.