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Amherst council adopts regional safety action plan aiming to halve serious and fatal crashes by 2045
Summary
After a presentation by regional planners, Amherst Town Council voted 3–0 to adopt the Central Virginia Regional Safety Action Plan, a USDOT-funded strategy that targets a 50% reduction in fatal and serious traffic injuries by 2045 and prioritizes high-injury corridors for improvements.
Kelly Hitchcock, identified in the agenda as the presenter for the regional planning effort, told the Amherst Town Council the Central Virginia Regional Safety Action Plan was funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and that the planning district (CVPDC) was awarded $280,000 with a $70,000 local match to develop the plan.
“The goal is to prevent death and serious injuries on roadways and streets and providing all users — those in cars, those on buses, those who walk,” Hitchcock said during her presentation. She said the plan uses a “safe system” approach prescribed by USDOT and relies on data-driven analysis to identify where serious crashes concentrate.
Hitchcock cited the plan’s key finding for Amherst County: while many crashes occur across the network, “in Amherst County, 65 percent of those fatal accidents and serious accidents happen on 2 percent of Amherst County roadways.” She told the council the plan identifies site-specific recommendations developed with engineers, school personnel and VDOT to address those high-injury corridors.
The plan sets a regional target to reduce fatal and serious traffic injuries by 50 percent by 2045. Hitchcock noted the target is aspirational — federal agencies do not withhold funding for localities that miss the target — but she said formally adopting the plan improves the town’s ability to apply for competitive grants and to coordinate projects with VDOT and regional partners. She also noted an upcoming federal grant round described in the presentation as making roughly $1 billion in demonstration and planning funds available.
Council moved to adopt the safety action plan by resolution and approved the motion in a roll-call vote; the three council members present voted in favor. The adoption commits the town to the plan’s leadership and goal-setting but does not, by itself, appropriate funds for specific projects.
Next steps described in the presentation include pursuing grant opportunities (including USDOT programs and VDOT HSIP-related funding), coordinating site-level engineering recommendations with town staff and VDOT, and establishing a progress and transparency framework led by the planning district and partner agencies to monitor outcomes over time.
