New plan to reduce serious and deadly crashes in Meck., Union and Iredell counties

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – There is a new plan to make roads around the Charlotte area safer by reducing serious and deadly crashes. In Uptown on Wednesday, officials from the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization announced the Comprehensive Safety Action Plan. Mecklenburg, Iredell and Union counties will now share crash data in order to identify and implement ways to reduce crash rates.

The coalition will share an interactive map to identify existing crash locations, as well as potential crash locations, and then push that data to committees made up of staff and residents. The committees will then deliver targeted traffic safety plans to the counties.

Project Implementation Planner Will Snyder says, “In the last five years alone, over 250,000 vehicular crashes have occurred in the CRTPO’s three county planning area, including over 900 crash related fatalities and over 2500 serious injuries.”

CRTPO says pedestrian and bicycle crashes make up 1.2 percent of total crashes, but represent 16 percent of fatal and serious injuries. The group calls all roadway deaths and serious injuries, “unacceptable.”