Spring Hill city staff and consultant HDR presented a draft Safe Streets for All (SS4A) comprehensive safety action plan to the city council on May 22, outlining 20 years of prioritized projects and short-term actions to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries.

The plan, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Transportation, identifies a high-injury network that accounts for roughly 80% of the city’s fatal and serious injury crashes while comprising less than 25% of local roads, and recommends 25 projects and about 30 miles of roadway improvements to be implemented over two decades. "We used the safe system approach," Jay Aber of HDR said, noting that engineering, speed management, vehicle safety and post-crash care are part of the strategy.

Why it matters: HDR told the council that between 2014 and 2023 Spring Hill recorded nearly 400 crashes resulting in injury or fatality, including eight fatal collisions and 42 serious-injury crashes. HDR estimated a multi‑million-dollar economic cost from those crashes and said public input showed broad local concern about safety, particularly along U.S. 169 and near school crossings.

Key details: The draft plan groups projects into state routes (notably U.S. 169), county roads and city streets and prioritizes work into short-, medium- and long-term phases. Short-term actions proposed for the first two years include adopting a Vision Zero resolution, establishing a transportation safety board to track progress and report annually, integrating safety elements into projects already in progress, pursuing SS4A implementation grants, and targeted speed enforcement with the police department.

Councilmember questions focused on public engagement and next steps. "We had a public meeting last night," Allison Abel, city staff, told the council, and HDR reported more than 130 survey responses and a crowd-sourced map of locations of concern. HDR said the plan would be presented to the planning commission on June 5 and brought back to the council for formal adoption on June 12.

No formal vote was taken; the presentation was conducted as a discussion item and staff said adoption and future grant applications will return to the council for action. HDR and staff said the plan is intended to create a funding and implementation framework so the city can apply for outside grants and program incremental construction over time. The council thanked staff and HDR for the work.