Resolution_Adopt 2023_2025 Kittitas County Safety Plan

Home Browse Search

contribute to run -off-road accidents. Injury and serious injury accidents have also contributed to the increase in priority Huntzinger Road has experienced with the County. Segments along this road have been identified as areas where safety improvements would make a large impact on reducing total accidents in the future. Huntzinger Road has been split into a two-phase project that addresses approximately half the road at a time, starting with the higher risk portion based on collected data. Additionally, the County has re -thought its approach to addressing the need to improve 178 bridges and structures that have been identified as having deficiencies. Past safety plans have also addressed this need, but due to limited County forces, Kittitas County has been unable to provide a feasible solution to this problem. Recognizing the importance of addressing the deficiencies in these structures, the County needs additional research, planning, and engineering to come up with a feasible solution. Through this, the option for an outside consulting service to evaluate and prioritize a systematic way to address these deficient structures would be possible. Prioritized Cost -Effective Safety Improvement Projects Road segment safety improvement identification used a combination of spot location and systematic approaches. After improvements were identified, they were prioritized based on the potential for crash prevention and greatest benefit, as supported by engineering judgement. Kittitas County evaluated the scoring and road segment safety improvement results to find high risk, sizable benefit countermeasures to group together as countywide safety projects that promptly provide the biggest benefit for the most efficient cost. Examples of grouped projects in past safety plans include bridge rail improvements and Intersection Corridor Improvements. Bridges rated Code 1, Code 2 and Code 3 were broken into phases to create more manageable projects for design and construction improvements. Such improvements include bringing bridges up to current WSDOT standards through approach improvement, replacement of timber railings, or the addition of railing for bridges with none. In addition to this, Intersection Corridor improvements across the county would target specific intersections that have insufficient or non -effective safety measures based on accident data and safety studies. Kittitas County is currently 95% complete in its designs to improve previously targeted intersections and corridors by improving clear zones, providing LED -enhanced signs, and taking increased visibility measures for high- risk locations. By focusing on similarities in the roads and their needs, priorities for the 2023 Kittitas County safety improvement projects were formed to address a wider range of project locations for safety improvements, rather than specific road focused projects. This allows the County to better reduce the possibility of fatalities and/or serious injuries across the County. In addition to this, locations with similar geographic vicinity were grouped together to provide efficient contracting and create more cost-effective projects. A summary of the Safety Improvement Projects can be found in Table 4, followed by project details including preliminary scope, locations of the proposed work, and an estimated 10