High-crash areas targeted
The City of Boston was awarded $9 million in federal funding to address nine high-crash intersections, and plans to start construction by the end of 2024.
Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge said fatalities occurred at two of the targeted intersections last year, and traffic deaths and serious car crashes occurred at a number of the locations in prior years.
The areas — five in Dorchester with one located in part of Mattapan, two in Chinatown, one in Roxbury and one in East Boston — were selected through an analysis of the city’s Vision Zero map, he said.
“These are intersections that have a history of serious injury or fatality crashes and/or have been places that have been identified by neighbors as places where they don’t feel safe,” Franklin-Hodge said.
“We’ll be using this funding to implement a number of different strategies or potential strategies that can help slow speeding, make safe crossings safer, reduce confusion and the likelihood of a crash.”
Boston’s planned safety improvements include raised crosswalks, pedestrian refuge islands, street rightsizing, curb extensions, slow turn wedges, speed humps and high-visibility crosswalks, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
USDOT awarded the funding this week as part of its Safe Streets and Roads for All Grant Program, established by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The $800 million investment by the Biden-Harris administration, which will fund 510 projects, comes after traffic fatalities reached a 16-year high in 2021. Preliminary data indicates those levels will remain similar in 2022, according to USDOT.
A new report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows the economic impact of traffic crashes was $340 billion in 2019.
“Every year, crashes cost tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to our economy,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement. “We face a national emergency on our roadways, and it demands urgent action.”
Franklin-Hodge said the effort in Boston will kick off at the end of the year with project design. It is aligned with the city’s Vision Zero program, which aims to eliminate fatal and serious traffic crashes in the city by 2030.
There were 3,298 total crashes and eight fatalities throughout the city last year. Five of the fatalities were pedestrians, one was a bicyclist and two people died in a car crash, the Vision Zero map shows.
Franklin-Hodge said the city plans to begin construction on road improvements by the end of 2024, or in 2025, and complete that work by 2025 or 2026.
USDOT also awarded a $2.2 million grant to the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization, which will use the funds to develop a safety action plan.
There were 548 traffic fatalities and 4,785 serious injuries in the Boston region between 2016 and 2020, according to MassDOT data.