The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded funds to the Michiana Area Council of Governments (MACOG) for the Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program.
MACOG will receive a $500,000 grant to develop a Regional Safety Action Plan focusing on strategic and prioritized approaches to reducing roadway fatalities and serious injuries within the four-county region including Elkhart, Kosciusko, Marshall, and St. Joseph Counties. When the plan is completed, local communities in the region will be eligible for implementation grant funding.
Congress under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law created the Safe Streets and Roads for All program. The program supports US DOT’s comprehensive approach, laid out in the National Roadway Safety Strategy, to significantly reduce serious injuries and deaths on our Nation’s highways, roads, and streets and is part of work toward an ambitious long-term goal of reaching zero roadway fatalities. This comes at a time when traffic fatalities are at the highest level they have been at in over a decade.
The MACOG region has a fatality rate of 11.13 per 100,000 people. MACOG is also making sure that attention will be given to our rural counties, Kosciusko and Marshall, as fatality rates are significantly higher than the regional average, with rates of 15.94 and 17.22 per 100,000 people.
