A Safe Streets Solutions event at City Hall gave community members a chance to share ideas and voice concerns to help make the city’s streets safer.
Safe Streets for All is a nationwide program through the Federal Highway Administration that aims to mitigate deaths and serious injuries on roadways.
Ultimately, public feedback – from the Nov. 6 event and in the future – will help craft the Cortez Comprehensive Safety Action Plan.
Data will also help inform the plan that Bohannan Huston Inc., the engineering company hired to write the plan, will draft come spring.
They’ll consider how 69% of crashes where people are killed or seriously injured occur on 6.3% of Cortez road miles. Top crash corridors are on South Broadway and Main Street.
And how, of the five fatal crashes in Cortez between 2018 and 2022, two people were on a motorcycle and the other three killed were walking.
It’s no surprise, then, that the plan will be “Vision Zero,” a concept integrated into such plans nationwide that aims to zero-out traffic fatalities and serious injuries, said Scott Baker, the city’s grants administrator who secured a U.S. Department of Transportation planning grant to make this work possible.
In conjunction with that vision, the plan will work to improve multi-modality, which is a fancy way of saying safer walking and biking opportunities, though it will encompass all modes of transportation, Baker said.
“The hope is to land capital funding from the federal government to do these upgrades and repairs,” said Baker. “The point of this open house is to ask the public what improvements they’ll benefit the most from.”
The open house was set in the room where City Council meets.
There were consultants from Bohannan Huston Inc. there, and representation from the Cortez Police Department – they’re leading this project – to field questions and engage in conversation.
To foster public input, poster boards lined the front of the dais.
Some boards were educational, explaining what the action plan is all about and what they’re trying to achieve.
On others, community members could add sticky notes on a map of Cortez to places where they have specific safety concerns, or rate proposed “safe street designs” – think speed bumps, medians, roundabouts – with colored dots.
Every color of sticker but red means they’re on board with the designs, said Clare Haley, a consultant with Bohannan Huston Inc.
An idea to “add art into a street’s design” with colorful street murals or crosswalks got only red dots, plus a sticky note that said, “This is a BAD idea, unsafe and distracting!”
Putting in bike lanes to separate cyclists from cars got only green dots, as did “protected bike lanes,” which go one step further in protecting cyclists by adding curbs and flex posts to the lanes.
The speed humps suggestion attracted stickers of all colors – green, blue, yellow and red. Some notes suggested speed humps on North Ash Street and South Oak Street, across from Oak Meadows Mobile Home Park.
“Are there room for improvements? Absolutely. But some options are unnecessary,” said a couple of Cortez residents, who asked not to be named, at the open house.
They said they wanted to participate because of the city’s decision to put medians on Main Street a few years ago.
“They sold it as safety, but it’s done nothing but create safety problems,” they said.
The medians make it so firetrucks are unable to get through during an emergency. Twice they’ve witnessed a truck lay on its horn so traffic would move in order to get through, they said.
The pair agreed speeding is an issue in town, but feel that speed humps on Main Street or South Broadway would be unpractical.
Moving forward, the next step will be to draft a safety action plan, Baker said.
In addition to data and voices at the open house, considerations from a Hispanic Roundtable event on Oct. 29 will be accounted for in the plan, said Kelly Codner, the Cortez Police Department’s public information officer.
Eleven community members attended the roundtable and voiced a variety of concerns, from rarely seeing police patrol to bad lighting on the streets.
Codner also mentioned a Back to School focus group that brought in school administrators, parents and students back in August.
Baker said a separate capital grant from CDOT is helping make it safer for kids to walk to and from school by reconstructing sidewalks and reducing speeds, a project in its design phase that targets Mesa Elementary.
“We’d like to start blending these (projects) and get enough momentum to keep big money coming in,” said Baker. “Cortez doesn’t usually attract federal dollars. It’s money to make big changes.”
They’re hoping to have another open house before choosing which projects to prioritize this winter, ultimately finishing a draft of the plan in spring, Baker said.
Then, they’ll “roll it back out to the public for more feedback,” and submit a final draft for city council’s approval, he said.
From there, they’ll be able to apply for grants – that are capital and not planning ones – to make some of these ideas a reality.
There’s a survey on cortezsafestreets.com that will be open for a little while longer, Codner said.
“The city is in need of a number of infrastructure upgrades,” said Baker. “Streets are one of them.”
