Our Vermilion County Safety Action Plan has won a Special Achievement Award in ACEC Illinois' 2025 Engineering Excellence Awards!
The City of Danville, Vermilion County, and the Danville Area Transportation Study tasked Lochmueller in creating the Vermilion County Safety Action Plan. The team reviewed previous local, regional, and statewide safety plans, and current long-range transportation improvement plans of the study area. The understanding of baseline conditions then extended to data coordination including crash data, geometric data, demographic data to create Equitable Target Areas, aerial imagery, and confirmation of data accuracy.
The team integrated crash, traffic, roadway, and sociodemographic data to explore relationships between prevailing crash patterns, crash severities, roadway types, vehicle speed, vulnerable road users, and disadvantaged communities. The analysis summarized crash trends, provided insight into key crash patterns, and identified the high injury network.
Lochmueller identified common characteristics of segments and intersections where serious injury and fatal crashes have occurred in the study area. Potential characteristics were identified based on available roadway and roadside information, including items such as terrain type, adjacent land use, proximity to schools, roadway grades, shoulder type and width, access frequency, radii of horizontal curves, number of approaches to intersections, traffic control types, presence of lighting, intersection skew, proximity of intersections to curves, and proximity to commercial developments.
Upon completion of the spatial analysis, Lochmueller generated a countermeasure toolbox to list and describe potential countermeasures for both segments and intersections within rural and urban areas and roadways of various classifications.
Lochmueller also developed the grant application for the Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) federal grant program. In 2023, the grant application was accepted. Lochmueller made revisions based off feedback from the Federal Highway Administration and the client re-applied in 2024, where the VCSAP was awarded $9.9 million in implementation funds from the Federal government with a $2.5 million local match.
Lochmueller always develops Safety Action Plans with a focus on feasibility and functionality, which is why the plan was delivered in numerous formats. It included written documentation providing digestible summaries of the development process and recommendations on the application of the plan, considering already planned improvement projects and the financial constraints of the implementing parties. A web-based version of the plan with selected elements was also created.
