Res-2019-082 Road Safety Plan - Laserfiche WebLink

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countermeasures already in place. The list of candidate locations was further reduced by eliminating roadway segments where accidents were alcohol or drug related with no hazard at the site and segments where countermeasures were already in place and or where no countermeasures would have prevented the accident. While these road segments are important to monitor, there are several other locations that cause collisions due to deficiencies in the road structure. The remaining roadway segments were then evaluated for potential safety improvements. The county has identified the immediate need to address noncompliant guardrail on Vantage Highway, resulting from a program RAP overlay project. This recently funded overlay project for the rapidly deteriorating roadway from MP 21.25 to 27.75 will immediately render the existing guardrail noncompliant. Guardrail must be replaced from Type 28 to Type 31. The county considers this an urgent matter of public safety. With such a high number of crashes on this roadway, preventing higher risks for launching is a priority. This project will benefit those navigating Vantage Highway for work and recreation, especially during the winter months when the road becomes increasingly hazardous. Additionally, the county has recognized copious amounts of inadequate bridge railing. There are a total of 268 bridge structures within Kittitas County, many of which have insufficient railing or no railing at all. Since these observed hazards have a high potential for serious injury or fatal accidents, Kittitas County has chosen to be proactive and include these locations in this safety plan to prevent predicted future crashes. This preventative, systemic, risk-based approach is supported using the FHWA Systematic Safety Project Selection Tool criteria, which states that a site can be identified as a candidate for safety investment if it has multiple risk factors but no crash history. Finally, Kittitas County recognized a need to collect data to support a clear zone inventory for the entire county road system. The effort to identify hazards within clear zone for the purposes of creating this safety plan included utilization of a variety of tools, including Mobility, Google Earth, RoadViewer, and field visits. Future safety improvement projects could be better identified using a more thorough clear zone inventory targeting known hazard locations. For this reason, a planning project has been identified as part of this safety plan to collect clear zone inventory data, which will create a roadside hazard database, and identify potential countermeasures.