Centennial staff present citywide Safety Action Plan; commission hears outreach, data and next steps

City traffic engineer Anna Bunce on March 26 told the Planning and Zoning Commission that the draft Centennial Safety Action Plan uses a data-driven “safe systems” approach intended to reduce fatalities and serious injuries on local streets.

The plan, developed after a federally funded Safe Streets and Roads for All grant, compiles existing city safety programs, a citywide crash analysis and public outreach into a single, living document designed to make Centennial eligible for follow-on implementation grants and to guide local prioritization.

“It's an attempt to apply data analysis,” Bunce said, describing the plan’s emphasis on people, roads and speeds and the FHWA Vision Zero–style goals the plan adopts. She told commissioners the plan intentionally includes all roadways within city limits to meet federal funding requirements even when those roadways are not under Centennial’s direct control.

Bunce reviewed the plan’s background and scope: the city applied for the FHWA grant in September 2022; the project budget is $275,000, capped at 80% federal funding with a 20% city match; consultant work began in late 2023 and continued through 2024; and public outreach included summer district socials and a mailed survey to roughly 3,800 households. The consultant team assembled crash data and produced the draft now before the commission.

The presentation highlighted the plan’s required components for the Safe Streets and Roads for All funding: a safety analysis that includes all roadways within city limits, an equity assessment, a high-injury network based on 2019–2023 crash data, and a public-facing transparency/dashboard requirement to be published after adoption. Bunce said the equity section is limited in scope in Centennial because of the city’s demographics, but that the requirement was addressed in the draft to remain compliant with the grant.

Commissioners asked about technical details and community concerns. Questions covered the statistics metric “fatalities per million vehicle miles traveled,” how crowdsourced navigation apps like Waze affect neighborhood cut-through traffic, snow and ice impacts on single-vehicle crashes, enforcement coordination with the sheriff’s office, and whether the city will continue engagement after the plan is published. Bunce said the city maintains monthly coordination with the sheriff’s traffic team, that enforcement resources are stretched, and that the plan is intended to support requests for additional enforcement or targeted investments.

Bunce described existing and ongoing Centennial programs that the Safety Action Plan builds on: the Neighborhood Traffic Management Program (NTMP), rightsizing and restriping projects that have created buffered bike lanes in parts of the city, intelligent transportation system pilots, spot safety reviews, school-walk-shed analyses and regular coordination with neighboring jurisdictions on shared corridors. She said some countermeasures will be relatively small, low-cost changes while others may require larger capital funding or partnerships with outside agencies.

Bunce also pointed to specific project funding paths. She said Centennial has pursued Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) grants for high-priority intersections (noting an example intersection in the draft) and that HSIP offers fiscal-year grant matches typically described as large federal shares with smaller local matches. The plan, she said, is required to be a formally adopted city document for Centennial to compete for many future federal and regional grants.

Next steps Bunce outlined: a Public Works Night update to City Council on April 8, a public hearing at City Council on April 9 and a hoped-for ratification of the commission’s adoption on April 15. She also said the consultant-developed interactive dashboard would be published and updated annually once the plan is adopted, to provide transparency about crash data and project tracking.

The meeting began with a routine motion approving the consent agenda; the motion was moved, seconded and approved during the March 26 meeting. There was no formal vote on the Safety Action Plan at this Planning and Zoning Commission meeting; the plan will return to city council for the scheduled public hearing and adoption process.

Bunce closed by asking commissioners and residents to continue sending topic ideas for communications and outreach materials the traffic team will develop as part of the plan’s implementation.