College Place consultants present safety action plan draft, outline project priorities and grant path

Spencer Montgomery, a consultant with JUB Engineers, told commissioners that JUB is finalizing a Comprehensive Safety Action Plan intended to make College Place eligible for Safe Routes for All implementation funding and to guide local safety work.

Montgomery said the plan uses five years of local crash data (2019–2023) for internal analysis but that the Safe Routes for All application process will require nationwide-comparable data through 2018–2022, which means College Place’s two 2023 fatalities do not appear in that application-period dataset. “The 2 fatalities that we have were in 2023. So during the time period that we're reporting for for the implementation grants, there's 0 fatalities,” Montgomery said, adding the team will “mention the fatalities in in our narrative” so the application provides context.

The plan, Montgomery said, documents leadership commitment (he cited a city resolution setting a goal of “0 fatalities and 0 serious injuries”), a safety analysis, public engagement, policy and process reviews, a prioritized project list and a strategy for transparency. “We've done a fair bit of safety analysis to identify trends,” he said, and reported roughly 430 public comments were used to identify candidate projects and lower-cost near-term treatments.

Key proposals in the draft include spot improvements and policy changes (updated pavement markings, trimming vegetation obstructing sight triangles, signal backplate retroreflectivity), targeted intersection projects (considered roundabouts or 4-way stops at high-scoring locations, and advanced signage to reduce rear-end collisions), and corridor upgrades (center medians on Meadowbrook and added bike/ped facilities on high-speed segments). Montgomery proposed extending the existing two-way cycle track on the south side of Fourth Avenue through the College Avenue intersection by removing the eastbound left turn lane on Fourth and operating split-phase signal timing to preserve north–south left-turns on College Avenue.

Montgomery described the plan’s prioritization method: nine factors (including collision counts, traffic volumes, fatalities/serious injuries, accident rate, presence of sidewalks, safe routes to school/transit, and posted speed). “We gave a hundred points in each category, and we tried to spread those out in a in a reasonable way,” he said; any road with average daily traffic above the team’s 10,000-vehicle threshold received full points in that category. He acknowledged the method was partly empirical and invited commissioner feedback.

Commissioners raised data and implementation questions. Commissioner Williams asked whether the federal requirement to use data through 2022 would make the city appear to need less funding despite the 2023 fatalities; Montgomery answered that the fatalities could be described in the application narrative. Williams also asked whether traffic-volume counts were gathered when the university and schools were in session; Montgomery said counts were collected in September and acknowledged the city should verify whether counts coincide with the academic calendar.

Montgomery said JUB will send a near-complete draft within one to two weeks, seek a council workshop in early June and aim for adoption the following week so the city can submit the Safe Routes self-certification checklist for implementation-fund eligibility. He cautioned the city might not be highly competitive for the specific implementation grants but noted the action plan can strengthen other grant applications (TIB, TIP, CIP) by listing prioritized projects.

The presentation included a short list of low-cost candidate projects drawn from public comments (about a dozen): adding or upgrading lighting (Rose Street, Whitman Drive corridor), pedestrian crossings at specific locations (Birch & Fourth, Davis & Fourth), trimming hedges at sight-triangle locations, restriping faded pavement markings, and converting some intersections to four-way stops. Montgomery estimated a hardwired RRFB at one location would cost about $200,000 and said the team is exploring solar-powered RRFBs to reduce cost.

Montgomery said the team recommends annual collision review and a full safety action plan update every five years, and that the final plan will be posted on the city website for transparency. He asked commissioners to review the draft and return comments before the council workshop.

The presentation drew multiple commissioner questions and local requests for further detail (site-triangle reviews, reassessing on-street parking on Fourth Avenue west of College, and current-condition photos), which Montgomery and staff agreed to incorporate before council consideration.

The consultants and commissioners did not take a formal vote on the plan at this meeting; next steps are staff review of the draft, a council workshop, and a council adoption vote scheduled for early June.