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BPAC chair urges safety-first roadway designs as MPO adopts aspirational fatality targets
Summary
George Pearson, chair of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, urged the Technical Advisory Committee to prioritize safety over level‑of‑service measures and consider design changes to meet aspirational fatality targets.
George Pearson, chair of the Mesilla Valley MPO Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC), used the meeting’s public comment period to press the Technical Advisory Committee to prioritize safety in roadway design and planning.
Pearson said the BPAC and TAC recommended safety targets to the policy board and described the targets as aspirational because they are lower than recent year‑to‑year fatality counts and trends. He noted recent local deaths: “We've already had a bicyclist fatality and at least 2 vehicle fatalities that I'm aware of,” and urged that safety be “always the number 1 criteria” when designing roadways.
Pearson recommended design changes that tend to slow traffic, even if they lower level‑of‑service measurements, such as reducing lane width (for example, “maybe a 10 or 11 foot wide travel lane instead of a 12 foot travel lane”) and consulting NACTO standards for bicycle and roadway design. He said that if such changes save even one life, they are worth the tradeoff in traffic operations.
