Bill Passage Makes County Safety Corridor Program Permanent
The Association of Oregon Counties (AOC) and the Oregon Association of County Engineers and Surveyors (OACES) worked with the Legislature to pass House Bill 2154, making the County Safety Corridor Program permanent.
The top priority of every county road department is ensuring Oregonians can get to where they are going safely on our roads. Rural county roadways face significant safety challenges from limited cell phone reception, longer emergency response times, simpler roadway infrastructure, and risky driver behaviors. County roads suffered 719 fatal and serious injury crashes in 2022. While small-scale crashes are concentrated in urban areas, rural county roads see 74% of county road fatalities, and when vehicle crashes occur there, the risk of fatalities is significantly higher than on urban roadways.
In 2019, House Bill 3213 established the County Safety Corridor Advisory Group and launched the Safety Corridor Pilot Program to design and test safety corridors aimed at improving rural traffic safety. Safety corridors are short stretches of road that pair doubled fines, engineered safety improvements, education and outreach strategies, and increased enforcement on a county road with a history of fatal or serious crashes.
County road officials, county sheriffs, emergency response officials, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and AOC came together to develop the pilot program and recruit counties to put this idea into practice.
Two safety corridors were launched by the pilot program, with Lane County and Marion County taking the lead on this traffic safety intervention. With Marion County’s emphasis on engineering improvements and Lane County’s emphasis on public education campaigns, both models proved to be highly successful.
Fatal and serious injury crashes were severely reduced along both county safety corridors. These successes are all the more impressive when compared to state wide crash data, which showed increases in fatal and serious injury crashes across the transportation system during the same timeframe.
The pilot program demonstrated that doubled traffic fines, in conjunction with road signs, outreach, and enforcement, led to short-term successes on two stretches of county roadway that had a high incidence of fatal and serious injury crashes.
We are excited that this lifesaving and practical tool will now be available to all Oregon counties as a standing fixture in state law.
Contributed by: Jordan Cole | Policy Analyst
Photo credit: New safety corridor in place by ODOT/ CC by 2.0.
