Fort Worth receives $419,506 in grants to improve traffic safety

The Fort Worth Citywide Safety Action Plan is in motion, due to new federal funding aimed to fix roads in the region.

The Biden-Harris administration awarded new grant funding to a wide swath of Tarrant County, which encapsulates a population of 874,401, according to the grant. The county received over $400,000 to improve roadways.

Texas was awarded $72.7 million for road improvement projects at the local level to help reduce traffic fatalities, per an announcement by the U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Feb. 1. The new Safe Streets and Roads for All Grant Program, which included 28 grants for communities in Texas, invested $800 million nationwide.

This grant program is a bipartisan infrastructure plan to address roadway deaths, which claim more than 40,000 American lives annually. From 2016 to 2020, 474 traffic deaths occurred in the Fort Worth area, per the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System.

Fort Worth, which does not currently have a roadway safety system in place to reduce roadway injuries and fatalities, will use the grant to start a “data-driven, comprehensive” set of actions, according to the city’s action plan. The money will support safer roadway designs, appropriate speed-limit setting and more effective post-crash care.

The Department of Transportation offers more information about the National Roadway Safety Strategy including the Safe Systems Approach on its website.