Addressing Citizen Requests for Traffic Safety Concerns

Edited by Airton G. Kohls (Source: Local Road Research Board - Minnesota Department of Transportation)

Our 2017 TTAP Needs Assessment Survey pointed to "Communicating with the Public" as a workshop title of interest to our audience. Interestingly, I just received a TRB newsletter that included a new guidebook from the Minnesota Department of Transportation related to the topic.

Addressing Citizen Requests for Traffic Safety Concerns focuses on the importance of communication when responding to citizens. It provides local agency staff with a best practice approach to addressing traffic safety requests, as well as guidance on logging and following up on requests, standard responses and explanation of why a requested strategy may or may not be the appropriate solution. The document provides general guidance that can be modified to meet each agency's needs.

Tips to create an open dialogue with citizens, tools to submit a request, tips on how to address social media and assigning a point person to collect all requests are a few of the initial guidance presented in the guidebook. For example, it points that social media pages are not intended or recommended for official agency business/ traffic safety discussions. If a citizen posts a complaint about traffic safety related issues on social media, direct the person in charge of managing the social media account to respond to the comment by asking the citizen to contact the appropriate agency staff member and provide his or her contact information. This ultimately encourages a more civil discussion to address the issue than the citizen interacting with a faceless/nameless social media page.

Part 4 provides information about each of the most commonly requested traffic safety devices - stop signs, speed limit signs, crosswalks, warning signs, school speed zone, parking restriction signs and intersection control turn restriction signs. For each traffic safety device, a summary of general information, research on effectiveness, evaluation approach, thing to be aware of, and written and visual educational tools are provided. For example, the discussion of the effectiveness of stop signs include:

• Volumes: Depends on the makeup of traffic, number of stop signs, and the available adjacent routes. Stop signs generally do not result in a reduction of traffic.
• Speeds: Unlikely to reduce speeds, and depending on the saturation of stop signs, improperly installed signs can often lead to increases in speed between intersections to reduce lost time stopping at the stop sign.
• Safety: If installed in a location that does not warrant a stop sign or where motorists are likely to ignore the sign, the stop sign can lead to an increase in crashes due to driver behavior. If sight distance is poor due to a permanent installation blocking driver's line of sight, stop signs can have a positive effect on safety.
• Operations: Can add unnecessary delay to the roadway network.

Part 6 includes 3 case studies and part 7 includes example letters and emails that can be used as a guide or template when communicating with citizens. While we work on the development of our "Communicating with the Public" workshop, please take a minute and explore this guidebook. For a free download go to: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/research/reports/2017/2017RIC05.pdf

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