Brian Martin is the the executive director of the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission. The group’s mission is to improve road safety. At the end of last year, MVRPC received $480,000 to develop a comprehensive Transportation safety action plan. Recently, Martin spoke with WYSO’s Jerry Kenney about how they’ll use that money.
Brian Martin: The first step is to do an action plan, to look at the whole region. We're looking at the most urbanized counties. So, the study will be involved with Greene, Miami and Montgomery County and those four jurisdictions in, North Warren. That's what we call our metropolitan planning area. That's the most dense part of our region and the highest traffic levels. So, we start off with an action plan with these funds. That action plan will look at various crash locations and types of severity and, how they were caused and so forth. And then, we'll get out into the communities and ask residents about what they think and bad locations in their neighborhoods.
We don't want any fatalities, and so that's why we call this a "Toward Zero Action Plan." We want to try to reduce, crashes and especially fatalities by the time that we're finished with this work. But the goal, for our country, for our region, is to have, no crashes and certainly no fatalities. And then in the end, we'll have a study document, that we'll put forward for, you know, our top projects will fall out of hopefully. And then for those type projects and the implementation phase will go for more grants, to fund some of those big projects. But we want to turn the tide on, on the trend and where it's, where crashes are going. We want to start to have fewer and fewer crashes instead of more and more crashes.
Jerry Kenney: I know with my own experience driving that I have thought, well, here we are going through another summer of construction, but your office is playing the long game with regard to, citizen safety. On some of these projects.
Martin: Oh, no doubt, no doubt there's a little bit of pain. You know, there's construction all over the region at any given time. You know, the I-75 projects north and south of downtown have been going on for about a year. In the past, U.S. 35 would be under construction or I-70. But, yeah, definitely looking to that point of those projects being complete, that lane being added, or that new improvement being put in place, and that'll buy us some time, you know, until more work is needed. But yeah, we want to get to that point where, that everybody can travel safely, you know, and have a predictable, drive time, to reach their destination.
Kenney: Are there a couple of projects that you can point to where, situations were drastically improved for, commuters in a particular region?
Martin: Off the top of my head, if you, think about U.S. 35 on the east side of town, there was a recent lane addition a couple of years ago, to that project. And so that's an example of, adding throughput or more capacity, and giving motorists another lane basically to meander to get, you know, to their destination and to knock off, you know, 5 to 7 minutes of travel time. A lot of the roundabouts that are going in, like if you think about Alex Bell and, and Mad River over in Miami Township where it was a four way stop before and you throw in a roundabout, you know, at peak hour there's a substantial, savings, in terms of, getting through that roundabout approach to stopping at the four way stop. So, it maybe a little bit of pain, but these improvements are certainly studied. And when they're implemented, they do work well.
Kenney: Brian, any final thoughts on how perhaps, residents of the Dayton area should think about your organization and the work that you're doing?
Martin: Yeah, everybody in the Miami Valley Planning Commission, we serve that entire region. And most agencies, most governments can't say that we look at the whole region. We want to make sure that from end to end, our region is a safe and attractive and vibrant as it can be. And we want everybody throughout our region, the entire region, to have access to opportunity, to be able to have a good quality of life, to be able to raise their kids, have great jobs, have great housing stock. And so, the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission's, main mission is just to work for our region to help us all to succeed, no matter what the hurdle might be. We want a vibrant and strong Miami Valley region.
Kenney: Brian Martin is executive director of the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission. Sir, thank you so much for your time.
Martin: Jerry, it's my pleasure. Thank you, sir.
