Regional Safety Action Plan – Clark County

Starting in late 2023, the Southwest Washington Regional Transportation Council (RTC) developed a Safety Action Plan for Clark County. The plan was funded through a federal Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grant to help identify transportation focused safety needs and improvements across Clark County.

The plan takes a Safe System Approach, which acknowledges that deaths and serious injury crashes are unacceptable, humans are vulnerable and make mistakes, and that transportation networks must be proactive about providing multiple layers of protections for all users, whether they travel by foot, by car, by bike, via transit, or with the help of a mobility device.

The safety action plan:

• Brought together a multidisciplinary Safety Working Group to provide input throughout the process
• Established a regional target year for achieving zero fatal and serious injury crashes
• Identified current trends, policies, and needs by analyzing recent crash data and gathering input from local agencies and communities
• Developed safety strategies and an implementation plan to address fatal and serious injury crashes in the region
• Established performance measures to monitor safety over time

In 2021 RTC provided funding for the smaller cities (Battle Ground, Camas, La Center, Ridgefield, Washougal) to develop their first Local Road Safety Plans which are a requirement to have in place if agencies are interested in applying for federal Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) funds. These funds are allocated to the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) with the goal of reducing fatal and serious injury crashes by targeting funds to areas that have the most identified critical safety needs. 

WSDOT allocates HSIP funds through the County Safety program, City Safety program, and the Railway-Highway Crossing program. For agencies to apply for funding through the County and City Safety programs, they must have developed a Local Road Safety Plan that identifies and prioritizes projects based on crash types. In order to support local agency efforts to improve safety within Clark County, since 2021 RTC continues to support agencies by providing resources to update their Local Road Safety Plans. 

During the development of the Clark County Safety Action Plan RTC updated the local road safety plans for all of the smaller cities, Vancouver, and Clark County. For both of these cycles grant application support was also developed for the agencies. Since the adoption of the Safety Action Plan, RTC has supported another update of city Local Road Safety Plans in 2026 along with grant applications. The development of these plans has resulted in the the region receiving over $4.48 million in HSIP funds through WSDOT’s safety program.