33 Equity and Social Justice Engineering. The city now has a $21 million implementation grant from USDOT to put planned changes in place. The projects tackle the 10 corridors where safety improvements will have the greatest impact. “The work to prioritize those projects was all a GIS exercise,” said Amanda Deatherage, the transportation planner supervisor for Louisville Metro Government. “GIS analysis is woven through the work that we do. It’s the foundation for a lot of our decision-making.” Larger Government, Greater Awareness When Louisville merged with Jefferson County in 2003, Kentucky’s largest city doubled its population, and its area grew sixfold. GIS helped the government come to terms with its larger size. The GIS team gathered data to provide the new picture of residents and services. The city’s department of public works mapped traffic fatalities and suspected serious injuries. It found that more than 900 people had lost their lives on Louisville’s roadways since 2014, including 185 pedestrians. Staff then looked at hot spots and patterns. This awareness of fatalities and serious injuries led the city council to pass its Vision Zero Louisville ordinance. It marked a shift from the conventional reactive approach to traffic incidents. Instead, the city used the ordinance to look at the many layers of protection it could provide to both prevent crashes and reduce injuries. Our early Vision Zero work focused on educating the public about where fatalities were happening, using GIS. Now, we want to build support for projects to improve the transportation network and reduce the likelihood of crashes happening at all. —Amanda Deatherage, transportation planner supervisor for Louisville Metro Government The 10 roadway corridors included in the SS4A-funded project will benefit from an array of safety improvements, including the addition of better lighting, medians, and bicycle lanes. All project locations will be rightsized (e.g., converting a four-lane roadway into a three-lane roadway). Rightsizing is a Federal Highway Administration proven safety countermeasure that promotes safer speeds. It often adds a dedicated left-turn lane and provides enhanced mobility and access for all road users. Priority Projects When the Vision Zero Louisville ordinance passed in 2022, Claire Yates, a transportation planner, became the first program manager dedicated full time to Vision Zero. Early on, she placed an emphasis on communicating using maps and visualizations. She mapped 16 priority locations, using maps to help leadership understand the changes needed. Louisville staff wanted to modernize how they tell the story of where incidents occur. Crash data is critical, but it doesn’t encompass the entire story. GIS seeds solutions by providing greater context. “We have a lot of elected leaders to answer to and a lot of priorities,” Deatherage said. “We can’t fund everything at The Vision Zero Louisville Dashboard displays crash data to provide an accessible data-driven approach to address the causes.
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