City of Blue Lake is Working on a Local Road Safety Plan (LRSP) and Needs the Community’s Help

BLUE LAKE, Calif. (KIEM)- The City of Blue Lake has come up with a Local Road Safety Plan to combat the traffic issues from both residents and people driving through. 

They plan to collect collision information and “near miss” data which is a new approach they are taking to analyze traffic data. “Near miss” data goes unreported because neither an injury or fatality occurs. However the details surrounding an “almost” accident is crucial when creating a Local Road Safety Plan (LRSP) 

The LRSP will work with California’s Strategic Highway safety plans and they receive their funding from the Federal Highway Safety Improvement Program. The goal of the Safety Plan is to reduce fatalities and injuries with low cost changes to the roads and the road systems. 

“We were traditionally a timber town. So we have a lot of wide open roadways to facilitate that type of traffic use. What we’re seeing now is those roadways really increase speeding and we see a lot of distracted drivers in our community,” said Amanda Mager, City Manager at Blue Lake City Hall.”

The engineers working on the safety plan can now incorporate all issues like accidents, injuries, and almost accidents. 

“With the RSP, we’ve got existing data and see where there’s potential conflicts and then compare that to other intersections with similar geometry and try to litigate that,” said City Engineer at Blue Lake City Hall.

If you’ve experienced or witnessed a near miss, you can contact the city manager, Amanda Mager, at citymanager@bluelake.ca.gov.