North Platte hears transportation safety action plan aimed at reducing fatal and severe crashes

Jesse Poor, a transportation planner with consulting firm Felsberg, Holt & Ullevig, presented a draft Transportation Safety Action Plan to the North Platte City Council work session on July 1, outlining priorities and countermeasures intended to reduce roadway fatalities and severe injuries.

Poor said the plan, funded through the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grant, is intended to be an "action strategy" that helps the city organize projects and funding requests to improve safety, focusing on fatal and serious injury crashes rather than all crashes.

The plan uses a societal-cost weighting (EPDO) to rank 10 study areas and to prioritize projects. Poor identified the top-ranked study area as US‑83 South from Leota to Lake Maloney, which the plan counted as 136 crashes in the study period; he said the US‑83 central corridor, including Jeffers, had the highest total number of crashes in the study (321). The plan groups multiple intersections and segments into study areas so improvements are not considered in isolation.

Poor described the plan's focus on KSI — killed or severely injured crashes — and said the effort adopts a Safe Systems approach that "recognize[s] that all crashes are preventable." He recommended a 20‑year goal to reach zero roadway fatalities and severe injuries (the presentation framed this as a 20‑year target, approximately 2045) and emphasized that progress will be incremental and that human error remains a factor.

The presentation listed seven policy priorities intended to guide project selection and funding requests: collaboration and outreach; monitoring and reporting of safety progress; prioritizing infrastructure that reduces societal crash costs; establishing safe speeds; reinforcing outreach and enforcement; improving connections across highways and railroad corridors; and modernizing the pedestrian and bikeway network. Poor said the plan also includes FHWA-recommended proven safety countermeasures — a toolbox of engineering, speed-management, signal and crossing treatments to be applied where appropriate.

Council members and staff discussed coordination with state transportation officials. Poor noted that state highways and speed limits on routes such as US‑83 and Highway 30 are under the state DOT's authority and that the plan is intended to give the city additional justification, through societal-cost and performance-based data, when requesting state or federal changes or funding. He and council members discussed corridor-level solutions (for example, signal timing and leading pedestrian intervals on the Jeffers corridor), access and land‑use coordination along Highway 30, and possible temporary or demonstration treatments, including quick-build roundabout pilots or traffic calming where appropriate.

Poor said the team will produce a draft implementation plan and recommended projects for the council to review in July, with an expectation of a final plan and a resolution for adoption by mid‑August to early September. No formal vote or action was taken at the July 1 work session; the presentation was informational.

The discussion also addressed multimodal details raised by stakeholders and staff: opportunities to modernize the language the city uses for active-transportation facilities (e.g., "multiuse trails," "sidepaths," "bike lanes"), suggested signage changes on viaducts to allow cyclists to "yield to pedestrians," and the need to coordinate with Lincoln County and NDOT where corridors cross jurisdictions.

Council questions touched on methodology and local comparisons: Poor explained the EPDO weighting and why some long corridors were treated as single study areas, and he noted that improvements already made on Jeffers predate part of the crash data used in the analysis and thus will be reviewed as newer data become available.

Next steps described by Poor included preparing a draft implementation package of named projects, studies and funding strategies that the council can prioritize; the consultant advised packaging projects as corridor or bundle applications to match successful grant strategies. A final plan with materials suitable for an adoption resolution is expected in late summer.

Ending: The work session was informational only; council members directed staff to continue coordination with the consultant and with state and county transportation partners so the recommended projects can be reviewed and prioritized for funding and implementation at a subsequent meeting.