Kevin Elliott 0:00 Kevin, welcome to home safely, a podcast from the National Center for rural road safety. Hi everyone. I'm Kevin Elliot. I'm your host on the podcast, and I'm the marketing manager for the National Center for rural road safety. Each episode on our podcast will bring you stories, strategies and solutions that are helping communities across the country make their roads safer for everyone, whether you're behind the wheel, designing the road, or just a community member, we're all working together out there to get everyone home safely. Enjoy the episode. Hey everybody. I am super excited about this interview, and I'm really excited for you to hear from our guest today on home safely. This is Matthew Enders. He is a great transportation safety champion from the state of Washington. He's known nationally. I met him years and years ago, and we've become friends and seen each other at safety functions and safety meetings and peer exchanges and things all over the country, and so when we were conceiving this podcast, in our top people of some of our first guests, Matthew was one of them. So Matthew is with the Washington State Department of Transportation, local programs. I'm gonna let him tell a little bit about himself and his background, but he's a unique person in his job and his role in the D O T and had some unique perspectives from a state, Washington State, that is at the forefront of some of the best rural transportation safety work in the country. And so we're, we're very, very honored and very excited to introduce you to Matthew Ender. So Matt, tell everybody a little bit about yourself and your job. Matthew Enders 1:42 All right. Thank you. Kevin, so my background, I've been doing this kind of work for over 25 years now. It's been a little while. I started my career working in traffic engineering, working on signal timing and roundabout operations and all kinds of fun things there, and then also got to be involved in some safety projects, some corridor safety projects that we had around the state. And just really enjoyed the safety aspect of the job. A few years in, I had an opportunity to take this role in our local Programs Division, which is a miniature Department of Transportation in our agency, we have all the same offices you might have in the rest of the agency, but they're one or two people that do each of those roles that deal with environmental things and right of way and design and construction and all these kind of things. And so I oversee our traffic engineering and Safety Group, and so our team primarily works on safety related things, and in our role in local programs that's with primarily cities and counties around the state, we do some work with tribes and ports and other groups as well, but primarily with cities and counties and helping them to improve the safety on their roadways. And that's kind of how things all got started. And where I am today? Kevin Elliott 3:01 Yeah, the Washington State is, like, I think most other states in the country, is that a really big percentage of your fatal and serious crashes happen off the state system. They're on the local roads, right? Matthew Enders 3:14 Yes, for ours, it's roughly two thirds, 1/3 two thirds on the local system, 1/3 on the state system. Our vehicle miles traveled, of course, skews more toward state highways, but our road mileage, it's mostly local. In the state we've got close to 90,000 miles, centerline miles of roadways, and only about 7000 and a bit of that is state highways, that the rest of it's local. And so a lot of our mileage and a lot of our crashes fate on serious crashes, are on the local system. Kevin Elliott 3:46 And so this is a huge need, right? Two thirds, it's the majority. And I think I don't know, is your role, or that kind of structure of a local roads program unique, your role there, or is kind of rare where you you have this D O T inside of D O T that's made just to help locals. Matthew Enders 4:01 It is a little more more uncommon. There are other states that do that do similar things, but it's it's uncommon that we have a local programs group that that mirrors the D O T to support local agencies, and that includes for safety. Most of the safety folks I interact with across the country have responsibility for all of the safety in their state, and ours is a little more unique in that my role is focused on the local roadways piece, and that that's such a large piece in our state, so it's a significant part of what we do. Kevin Elliott 4:31 It seems like it's a big part of the philosophy of your D, o, t, when I started to learn about this, and I met you early on and learned some of the innovative things that Washington state is doing it. This is one of them where you they dedicated a a piece of the D O T to just focus on where the data say most of these crashes are happening for people who don't know much about the state of Washington. They know Seattle, right? They know Tacoma, maybe tum water or something, teller. Anybody the mix of, say, urban versus rural roads in Washington State. Matthew Enders 5:05 So we have a pretty good, a pretty good mix of mileage between urban and rural. We've got the whole i Five corridor, which runs from Portland, Oregon in for in our area, up through Seattle and North obviously runs all the way down to from Mexico to Canada, but that whole corridor, most of it fairly urbanized. Most of our big cities lie along there. We do have a couple more urban centers in eastern Washington as well, over in Spokane and down in the Tri Cities areas, but a lot of our state splits with the Cascade Mountain Range, kind of down the middle that everything toward the coast and the west of there is more urbanized, and things more toward from the east of there are mostly rural. And that defines pretty well. It's a pretty balanced mix between urban and rural for our fatal and serious crashes, for what we're dealing with. There's a there's a pretty good mix for our cities and counties and state roads across both of those both of those types. Kevin Elliott 6:08 Have you ever been in a plane going over the Cascades? It's a super interesting experience where you see Desert, desert, DESERT on eastern side of the state, and you cross the Cascades, and you're in a rain forest, and it almost it sounds like your transportation system is roughly divided that way, also tell everybody some of the unique challenges that you see, safety challenges on your rural roads. Matthew Enders 6:28 So there are some very notable differences just based on that geography of our state, when you hit those mountains, because of that, all the all the water and rain that comes off of the coast makes all of Western Washington very wet, very green. Tons of trees. We are the Evergreen State. There are a lot of trees. It's the most common thing people run off the road and hit is a tree in our state, when you get over those mountains, that when all that moisture has been taken out, it's a lot more arid, a lot more dry, a lot more rural. And so just like you might see across Mid America, there's a lot of farming. There's a lot of agriculture type work, those kind of things that all fill in that Eastern Washington side, some wineries and places that they do those things along the southeastern part of the state as well. And so definitely, some different issues crop up in our rural locations in eastern Washington, we've got long distances to cover. You can spend six, seven hours driving across our state, and so it's long distances for some of the places people need to go, especially in the rural parts of the state. And so speeds tend to become a bigger factor, because you've got a long ways to go and you would just like to get there. Fatigue for drivers can be a factor as a part of that getting into long straight stretches of road in eastern Washington means you might not be paying attention like you should. All those kind of things. All are factors and the fact that you just have to drive a fair distance to go most of the places that you want to go, and so your exposure time out there on the roadway, anything that you've done that you probably shouldn't have been doing before you were driving impairment, or any of those kind of things. You've still got a probably a sizable drive that you're going for if you weren't doing that at home, all those kind of things. So a lot of unique rural challenges on the east side of state, on the west side of the state, we do have some big rural areas also, but in that very different environment, where it's a lot windier of roads, it's a lot more trees beside the road, a lot of things like that, where there's not a lot of forgiveness on the roadside, when, when something does go wrong,like most states, you have these rural roads that have unique problems. Kevin Elliott 8:31 And I would imagine, too the locals out there have fewer resources, fewer staff, and then they have these, these crashes that are unique, really into rural areas, right, like run off road crashes, I would have guessed right. I'm just guessing that's most states that lane departures are a big deal. Matthew Enders 8:52 Yes, absolutely. So yes to smaller staffs, yes to limited resources, and yes to trying to deal with these things over a very large, scattered network, so that, because they have 10s of 1000s of those miles of road where the next fate or serious crash is going to be is really hard to predict, and so it's a lot to cover, a lot to deal with, and getting the resources to Do it challenging. And also becomes, for these rural areas, a very personal issue for the folks dealing in road safety, because in some of these low population but large rural areas, you know the people, so the people, when the engineers are trying to work on their roadways, you know those people who were involved in those crashes, who died on the roadway those kind of things. It's, it becomes a personal thing for them, not just, not just numbers out there they these are actual names and people that they know. Kevin Elliott 9:48 Roadway deaths are always heartbreaking, but in rural areas, it is in some ways, very, very personal. We'll be back with more from Matthew Enders right after this short break. You. Cline, have you heard of the Road Safety Champion Program? It's our signature training course here at the National Center for rural road safety. It's like a safety 101, course for everyone in your agency. It's free, flexible and designed for workers at all levels in public works, EMS, law enforcement, planning and engineering, you name it. Through this national certificate program, you'll gain the tools and knowledge to make your community safer, and you'll earn the title of road safety champion. Along the way, everyone can help make rural roads safer. We want to equip you with the basic knowledge you need. Start your training today at rural safety center.org and be the reason someone gets home safely. I'm back with Matthew Enders. He's from the Washington State Department of Transportation, local programs, office. Matt, one of the first things innovative initiatives I ever heard about the Washington State D O T was regarding lack of resources in rural areas. And I think I met you through the FH, W, a local road safety plan push right, also known as safety action plans now, and you all were at the very front of trying to get your, I think every county in the state, right to do a local road safety plan, and then also tying funding resources to those local road safety plans to follow the data down to those to those local areas, to try and get resources where they're most needed. So if, if that's accurate, the way I just said that, if you could talk a little bit about that, because that's a very big deal, we, a lot of people say there's lack of resources in rural areas, but Washington state seems to really put some money there. Matthew Enders 11:43 So, yes, we have it. Was back about 2012 2013 we were looking at the way we funded projects for our local agencies, and one of the challenges that I would run into which I had been around for enough years, I had done several cycles of grant funding for them through the Federal Highway Safety Improvement Program. And one of the challenges that I tended to run into with agencies was every time we would put out a new call for projects, it seemed like everybody was going back to the drawing board. It was time to reinvent the wheel and figure out, what should we do this time? What should we apply for what kind of project? And it tended to, for some agencies jump around a bit that there didn't seem any consistency to what they were doing. For other agencies, if their staff had turned over, which happens all the time with local agencies, they didn't know what had been done before, so they kind of had to start with a new process or do something. And for some it was just hard to figure out what kinds of things should they be doing and that they should go after. And so back then, we looked around at what, what could we do differently that would assist local agencies in in having a better plan for what they should be doing for safety from call to call, so that when you got to the next call, you knew what had come before, and you knew what you were going to do. And as we looked around at the time, the state that had done the most in that area was Minnesota, and they had taken some funding and pushed that out through a consultant to help their local agencies develop safety plans. So we looked at that and liked the concept, but we went about it in a little bit different of a way, because rather than hiring some consultants on board to help with that statewide, we went around and pulled together information about what that would look like, and then went around and conducted workshops with the counties to say, here's what this is, and here's what we would like you to do with your staff. So we wanted them to internally develop these safety plans so that they would have their total buy in their collective knowledge of their roadways would be, what would be driving those decisions? And so we talked with them about how to how to do that, how to accomplish safety in a rural setting, looking at systemic safety, trying to identify risks and needs on their system and prioritize those based on the fatal and serious crashes that they had, and then expanding that out and looking for where on the rest of their system were those issues, and where should they prioritize based on that? And we tied that to funding in 2014 our county safety call for projects required the agencies to develop a local road safety plan in order to be eligible to apply. And as I went around the state and conducted workshops on those I met a lot of concern and resistance, a little bit to the concept, because it was new and different, and they didn't know what we were asking for going in, but I would say coming out of those workshops, almost every county thought that that was something they could probably do. We weren't asking for something complex or difficult to do. We just wanted them to say, what does your day to say? What does that look like on your roadways? And where would you prioritize based on that? And we ended up with 31 of our 39 counties developing a plan and applying for those funds in 2014 in the years since then, we. We have gotten up to now 38 of our 39 counties, so we're, I'm not quite at 100% but I'm really close to getting all of them developing plans. And we've also expanded that process to our cities as well, so that they go through the same thing that the counties do based on the proof of concept that went so well with the counties in both what they could develop with that and the effectiveness of doing it. Kevin Elliott 15:22 The plans are good for everybody, right? I mean, in that you all put it in train them, but and incentivize them, but wanted them to have ownership because they because they do these, especially in the rural areas. They know they have such local knowledge of what's going on in their local culture that it really is best for them to make their own plan. But you all tying funding to that? I think that's still relatively rare in the country where we're a state, D O T will funnel that amount of money down to the local agencies where the problems are really happening. And so they all made plans. What are some of the feedback you got from these ones who did and received some of that funding? Matthew Enders 16:05 So my, my favorite piece of feedback, so we surveyed a little bit after that, and the actual County Association surveyed themselves about that and how it went. So it didn't actually come from us. My favorite piece of feedback out of that was a couple of counties who told me we really should have done this years ago for ourselves, that this was a valuable process and document that they developed on their own for their own purposes, that just also happened to work for, applying for the safety funds from us, but that it was a good way, because trying to walk them through it at first to say, it's not your comprehensive plan that has everything in it, and, oh, here's a project that has an element of safety in it. It's really looking at, if safety was your only consideration, where would you go? What would you do first? And that was eye opening and game changing for a number of those agencies, to look at it that way and to develop something that was purely safety driven to give them their priorities, and came up with so many good and really low cost things to start with, we paid for millions and millions of dollars worth of just signing upgrades in almost every county who looked at that and said, Well, that's a an easy thing they could Do. They would cover most of their network for a relatively good cost, and we saw statewide numbers for on county roads specifically drop in the several years after that, from that alone that we didn't have any other reason to explain why those fatal and serious crashes would have gone down other than it was almost blanket across most of the state that almost all of them did a total overhaul of their signing on their roads, and it drove statewide numbers somewhat for several years. Kevin Elliott 17:48 I want to reiterate that and connect those dots so local road safety plan, plus funding and resources to follow that plan, to execute that plan, plus low cost, systemically installed counter measures equaled in Washington State, lower fatality numbers. Matthew Enders 18:09 At a time when our other roadways in the state, city and state highways were flat lining or slightly increasing. The county road numbers were going down, and I want to say it was 10 to 15% ish range on their fatal and serious crashes in those first three to five years after we implemented plans and started funding those projects. Kevin Elliott 18:32 That's great, right? That's the dream scenario. So before we move on, because I want to move on to the safe system approach and some other things out in rural areas. We've talked you and I about the systemic approach, or systemically installed so I don't want to gloss over that for people who may not know what that means. If I were to say, what is the systemic approach, or what is systemic installation of countermeasures, what do you mean by that? Matthew Enders 18:53 There's a couple different ways we implement safety improvements. One of those is spot locations. You see a problem in one location, you need to fix that one thing. You do it in that one spot. There are countermeasures that we would put out on the roadway, upgraded signing rumble strips, where you can pavement markings, those kind of things you would like to put them on your entire roadway network. They would benefit everybody, everywhere. Those if you can afford it, you do systematically every single location. Every time you do something, you put that stuff out there. When we look at systemic safety, it's really looking at things that we wish we could do systematically and put them everywhere, but there's nowhere near enough money out there to put things everywhere. And so systemic safety is looking at, how do you prioritize on your entire network? Where would you put these things first, the highest priority locations, and start with those hopefully someday when the funding is giant and years have gone down the road that you put everywhere, ultimately, but where would you prioritize and start with those things? And so that's our systemic safety approach and what we do, and it's really for us and our. Agencies looking at those safety plans, it's really looking at where are their most common risks, or roadway characteristics, where they see fatal and serious crashes, and looking on their network, where do those things exist, where do multiple of those characteristics exist, and wherever those are, those become the high priority locations to address first, and so systemically, we're going out addressing the top priority locations the very first in order to hopefully have the greatest impact. Kevin Elliott 20:29 Proactively. Yeah, and that's a big word there, with the systemic approach is proactive, because what you mentioned the first is sort of hot spot approach or and apologies to the listeners for these terms, sometimes because we have hot spot or site specific, systematic, which is everywhere, all the time, and systemic, which is high priority, high risk locations. But yeah, yeah, the systemic approach is a big deal. It's the analogy we use a lot. Is it's like a health checkup, a proactive health checkup. You check your blood pressure, you check your family history, you check your diet and exercise, and if you have risk factors for diabetes or heart disease or high blood pressure, your doctor knows those risk factors that precede a major event, they go ahead and help you either do diet and exercise or medications or to proactively mitigate the risk factors. And if they can do that, that can prevent the heart attack. And that's, that's the idea, right? If you have, if you have curves in of a certain radius in your area where you're seeing run off the road, fatal crashes, and you have lots of other curves, like that curve, you know those are risky curves. So go ahead and maybe put some chevrons or wider edge lines or shoulders or rumble strips on those curves across the system, and you get out there before a crash happens, and that's the proactive side of it. It's a big deal, and I know that's a big part. And the other benefit of that is you it is more affordable because you aren't putting countermeasures on every inch of roadway. You're picking the really tricky spots. Matthew Enders 21:57 Yeah, absolutely. And the medical similarities, very, very good analogy for how that works, for what they're trying to do. And, yeah, for 10s of 1000s of miles of road, rural roads, you just can't get to everywhere. So you have to prioritize. Kevin Elliott 22:11 Leading from there, local road safety plans, systemic deployment, or the systemic approach and network screening and all those kinds of things we've evolved as a transportation community, and the latest sort of way to articulate that is called the safe system approach. It's relatively new in America. It's not in Europe and other places. Australia, I think, has been, been doing, implementing this for a couple decades, and seeing some good results for people who maybe don't know or never heard that term. It is a bit of a sea change for those of us in transportation safety, and a different philosophy for how to see and approach roadway safety, if you would, for the listeners, give us a rundown of what the safe system approach is. Matthew Enders 22:57 So the safe system approach is looking at the whole system, when you're looking at safety, and not just looking at any one piece, but trying to say, what are all the elements involved that might have had an impact, or could have an impact on any individual fatal or serious injury crash, and trying to address those issues in each of those different elements, which for the safe system approach looks at things like safer vehicles. Are there things that could have been done that could have made the vehicle itself safer? Then those are things that we should tackle from that direction. Are there things on the roadway, safer roadways that you could be addressing, that you could do something different on the roadway that could have made a difference in a crash? There's post crash. Care, where, if a crash does happen, are there things that you can do to help mitigate that so that somebody doesn't die or end up seriously injured out of that crash? There's safer speeds. Where you're looking at, what could you do to reduce the energy involved in a crash, to help reduce the severity of a crash, or do things like that. There's safer roadway users trying to find all the different elements of what are the people behind the wheel doing that are impacting these crashes result in a crash that we could do differently to help improve that and I'll just say in Washington state, in our adoption of the safe system approach, we also include a slice of that wheel for safer land use, that's looking at what are the choices based on what we do with those roadways and the adjacent uses of those roadways that also impact things that might have led to that crash that we could do differently to reduce the odds of that. So we're looking at it from all these different areas and saying, is there some way in any or all of those different categories that we could do something different that's going to reduce the chances of somebody dying or being seriously injured in a crash. Kevin Elliott 24:49 Very good. That was, that was a good, a good rundown. And as usual, the Washington State Department of Transportation is adding on to and doing extra. They are advanced. They are overachievers over there. We're going to. Add another sliver to it. We're going to take a break for a minute, but I'm here with Matthew Enders from the Washington State D O T local programs. We're going to talk more about when we come back, talk about the safe system approach and how they folded it into their state highway safety plan and into local road safety plans. We'll be right back. You might be listening to this podcast, but maybe you aren't familiar with the National Center for rural road safety. We're a Federal Highway Administration National Center for Excellence dedicated exclusively to saving lives on rural roads. We offer free training and technical assistance, monthly webinars and other content, all customized to life in rural communities. We are a national hub that equips local agencies, first responders and communities with the tools they need to make rural travel safer. Because we can't achieve zero deaths on America's roadways without addressing rural roadways together, we can make sure everyone gets home safely. Learn more at rural safety center.org and we're back with Matthew Enders from the Washington State Department of Transportation, local programs office. We were talking about the safe system approach, specifically in rural areas. And I think my favorite thing about the safe system approach, or my favorite part of it, is that it starts with the premise that humans make mistakes, and while one sliver, one element of the safe system approach is safe for road users, of course, this philosophy doesn't depend on humans fixing their behavior. Only if a human makes a mistake on a road, then what? How do we keep them from dying because of their mistakes? That puts now the responsibility on all of us to think like a system. How do we surround those people in every way we can to make sure that mistakes are not fatal? You all have folded that philosophy into your state highway safety plans and to other things. So talk to me a little bit about how in Washington State, you all are implementing the safe system approach. Matthew Enders 26:59 So in Washington State, the safe system approach, I'll talk about from a couple areas. First, our Strategic Highway Safety Plan, which for us is called Target Zero, we have fully implemented the safe system approach as the organization and fundamental guidance for our state safety plan. So it's, it's how everything is organized now, how all of our strategies and programs are built around is all looking through that lens of, how can we address safety, through the safe system approach in those different areas? So it's, it's become our overall guidance, turning that into implementing it on everyday projects with individual communities is a more challenging thing to do. What does that mean? And how do you do it? I'll give an example of one of the ways we're attempting to do that, which is the local road safety plans that we talked about, and agencies that developed those have mostly been developed in an infrastructure focus, the safer roads piece of things, because that's the source of funding that we were tying it to. We said, if you want access to infrastructure money, then you need to develop a plan. And so they would put together a plan focused on the roads. Piece primarily. Some of them might have drifted into safer speeds a little here or there, or, you know, the occasional agency might have, might have tried to go beyond that, but mostly it stuck to safer roads. We have started a pilot program with our Governor's Highway Safety Office to work together with some communities to pilot what would a local road safety plan look like that was developed through the safe system approach. So something that's more comprehensive and covers all those different elements. So most of those agencies, rural agencies for us, have the safer roads piece already well done, and have updated it multiple times, refined it. They've got a good handle on that, but it's getting them to start primarily partnering more looking for who are the other players and partners in safety that should be involved, that are all looking at at these same crashes, and all trying to figure out, how do we reduce those? And doing that in a more combined way, where they can, they can combine their efforts. And so we're piloting that with three communities around the state. We've got kind of an urban location. We've got kind of a mix urban and rural location, and one that's pretty rural, and they are looking at who all is involved in safety from all the different areas, looking at their law enforcement agencies, looking at Department of Health, looking at Department of Licensing, looking at employers, looking at community groups, looking at anybody that might have an impact on that schools, and trying to find ways to bring them in, talk to them about what do they do, and just trying to identify, are there key things that they are doing or could be doing that would improve this that. Approach to safety that's really looking at that holistic safe system approach. And so we're in that pilot process with these communities now. We had a State Safety summit focused on the safe system approach just this past summer, and we were looking at how to build that, how to grow with that. And these communities that we're piloting with, we had them bring teams to that summit, bringing their elected officials in, bringing all kinds of folks together from their communities to look at, what could they do? What are the best practices out there? How can they learn so that we can community by community, take the safe system approach and build it out so that it can, it can grow from community to community around our state. Kevin Elliott 30:40 Yeah, the safe system approach is a big philosophy, and it can be it can seem daunting, but it's best implemented at a very local level. When people take it on, it's like, holistic is the word you use, or multi disciplinary or integrated. This is where I think rural communities have the advantage, because they all know each other. The chief of police and the school district superintendent probably went to high school together. I mean, they they're friends. They this can be a very community effort. This isn't some high falutin concept. It can be, it can be very, very real. And I know you have experience too with doing like road safety audits and other things like that in a community. Matthew Enders 31:16 We have looked at that, and we've had a program for a number of years looking at how to implement that corridor by corridor. So our corridor safety program, and we have done that, where we bring together local communities, their leadership, their organizations that are involved in safety, to look at individual roads and look at what could we do here, from an engineering perspective, from a law enforcement perspective, in an educational way for the users of that roadway, with EMS as a partner. And what we could do to improve things and bringing them all together to do low cost near term improvements to roads to make a difference as soon as possible, without having to wait for some major improvement that's decades down the road. What could we do in the near term, just to make things better for everybody? And so we've worked with a lot of communities in doing that, and this safe system approach, from a community standpoint, is very similar, and kind of follows that same model of, how do we want to address this, but for a community instead of just for a single roadway? But it's the same kind of partners you're trying to bring in the same groups that, again, do all know each other in these rural communities, sometimes it's that same person wearing three different hats that they're coming to that meeting to represent and talk about and just trying to walk through. How can we all work together to get at the same common issue that we all would like to be better, to improve the lives of our citizens, right? Kevin Elliott 32:41 And this is taking a big philosophy of the safe system approach, and making it nitty gritty, real in the real world, on, you know, in their communities. And it's a it's a lovely thing to see, especially in these rural areas where, you know, they don't have the resources, necessarily, that some of the bigger places, but they have the people, or they have the relationships, and they have the heart and the networks to locally solve local problems, which is a lovely thing that you all help them do. One of your other roles is in your role with your local technical assistance program, your LTAP there in the state of Washington, state, because if you didn't have enough to do, you're also with the LTAP. So explain to people, if they never heard of an LTAP, we love them. They're great partners of ours at the National Center for rural road safety, what is an LTAP and what's your role there with an LTAP. Matthew Enders 33:29 It's a federal program nationwide. Every state has an LTAP center, and there's a partner TTAP organization for tribal that are regional, that work on that, and our focus and goal with that is to provide training and technical assistance and technology transfer new technologies to local agencies for their own roadways, to improve their staffs, their local expertise, to Do things in transportation and so a lot of L taps, and we do that, provide a lot of training courses for local agencies, just trying to give them basic building blocks and expertise on how to do things on the roadways. We provide a lot of one on one technical assistance to them on specific needs and issues that might be teaching them how to do something. Or it might be going out on an on site, at a roadway and looking at an issue with them and trying to help them resolve it. Or it might be bringing in new technologies that they haven't seen before, high friction surface treatments, and talking about this is what that is. Here's the kind of places you would use it. Here's what an installation would look like. We did a we did a statewide pilot of high friction surface treatments years ago, where we brought in local agency folks from around the state to come and watch an installation. The folks that came in and did it taught a county crew how to do it, and then we watched the county do an installation of that in order to make that and for those that don't know high friction service treatments that is adding friction to the road. Way, so that when you're going around primarily horizontal curves, your tires stick to the road better, so that you're less likely to run off the road in those kind of locations. It's trying to provide this kind of information to agencies that they can build upon. And one of those key things for us in Washington, in our LTP center is safety, where we are looking at, what can we do to teach you the basics of safety? What can we do to teach you one on one and give you those skills so that they will know the right kinds of improvements to make and the right kind of locations to do them that go into their safety plans and that build that and I know we have encouraged folks to explore and try through the Rural Road Safety Center, the Road Safety champions program, and to look at those basic building blocks of safety, as well as a part of our overall outreach to them. Kevin Elliott 35:49 Yeah, the L taps are such a magnificent resource. And again, the idea is to these understaffed, under resourced local and rural and tribal agencies to give them the help they need, equip the people who are out there living with this, and also to have the majority of lane miles and responsibility in their state. So this the L taps are a very big deal, such a good resource. And I know the Washington State one is a really, really good one. We'll be back with more from Matthew Enders right after this short break. Want to stay in the know on the latest rural road safety trainings, webinars and resources, all in one place. Join more than 30,000 professionals who get the National Center for Rural Road Safety bi weekly email newsletter. It's your quick digest of upcoming learning opportunities and safety innovations happening across the whole country Sign up today at rural safety center.org and never miss a chance to make a difference. Now back to our show. You all have been helping your locals too with the safe streets and roads for all grant funding right the SS for a if you don't know that that program came out under the last infrastructure bill. So State Departments of Transportation cannot even apply for this money. And so all the local, rural they can all apply for this money, but it's a big challenge. It's a federal grant program. And so the I know the LTP in Washington State, and others in Kentucky, I know I've talked with them, and some other states around the company country, are helping your locals figure out how to access this money. Matthew Enders 37:23 Yes, we with safe streets and roads for all, because that's going direct to the local agencies. They're needing to apply directly to federal highways. And it's not rolling through the state. It's direct between them. We have provided a lot of information to them about how to do that, what the program looks like. We have given them guidance, especially in the development of things like safety plans that there was carved out money set aside for safety plans that you could go and access and develop safety plans if you didn't have funding to do that. Otherwise, we have worked with agencies to review applications and look at what they're what they're putting together there. We've given them some guidance and feedback on what kind of things to apply for. Another good example of that are rural transportation planning organizations, or our metropolitan planning organizations. These planning organizations out there, we had some of those rural ones that cover a lot of rural counties come to us and ask about if we apply for funding for safety plans or things like that, what should we do? How should we be framing that? How should we make that work that fits in with what we're doing as a state, but also works for them in their individual locations? And so we'd give them guidance on how to do that and put those together to best meet their needs of their individual agencies within those larger boundaries of a planning organization. It's been a good partnership. We've been able to give them as much guidance as we can, not being the owners of that program, but give them as much feedback and help as that we can on that. And as you mentioned, there are LTP centers out there around the country who have gone to great lengths to support and encourage them and provide the technical background and information to help these agencies, planning organizations or individual agencies apply for funding and get the right kinds of things into those applications that hopefully would get funded. Kevin Elliott 39:18 Yeah, the LTAPS are such a good such a good network. And if you, if you, if you're out there listening, and you haven't contacted the folks at your L tap, your state has one. Every state has one, Puerto Rico has one, talk to the people at your L tap. They are some of the nicest people. Their entire job is just to help local agencies learn the things they need. And I've seen, I've seen courses everywhere, from network screening and systemic approach to chainsaw maintenance, like they teach everything, right? So it's a really, really great network of people, so reach out to them. Have you all coordinated? Or maybe talk a little bit about how you've coordinated with some tribes. We Matthew Enders 39:50 have worked with tribes on safety in a number of different ways. They are sovereign nations, and so it's a different approach. Coach, and just like our local agencies, they have a lot of staff turnover at times, and so we have worked with them. We have made our Highway Safety Improvement Program calls for projects open to them to be able to apply directly for funding. We have tried to give them good options to partner with cities or counties when they apply for funding. And we've had some better success with our rural counties, where a lot of the county roads cross tribal reservations and things like that, where they they work hand in hand to try and make those roads safer as part of larger projects that the counties might be doing that will include the tribal roads as a part of as a part of those safety projects. So we've had a number of those over the years where we've done that. We have gone to talk about safety, and me, again, representing the LTAP center, I have gone to their tribal transportation conferences to talk about funding programs, to talk about technical support we can offer to do all those kind of things so that they can grow in safety and in all the things that they do as well. And we've had some good conversations, some good success. We've had some on the ground, on site meetings now and then with them. And not forgetting that a lot of our tribes already have a tribal safety plan that they have developed for their own programs through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the safety programs from the federal side. And so a lot of them have a base already that they're building from for safety, and then we just come in and try and give them more tools, more resources to add to that and grow what they can do in safety as well. Kevin Elliott 41:39 Look, this podcast is called home safely. And that comes from the idea that we wake up every day and everybody, when they leave their home, wants to get back home safely. Everybody expects, everybody should expect, to be able to get home. And so people like Matthew Enders are out there in Washington State. But there are, there are Matthew Enders all over the country waking up every day and trying to get everybody home safely. Matthew, anything I haven't asked you about that you think is important for people to know about your work, or the state of Washington or or anything in this world, Matthew Enders 42:08 I would just say maybe the one thing we didn't cover that that has been so key to what we have done for rural safety in our state is years ago, before my time, years ago, smart people got together and decided we would fund safety on local roads proportional to their share of the fatal and serious crash issue. And so we have always split our Federal Highway Safety Improvement Program funds based on that process. And so for many years, decades now, that that percentage split has remained very consistent at 7030 in our state, 70% of our federal safety funds that come into the state go back out onto the local roadway system, and getting those funds to support local safety. That's the majority of safety funds that are out there for local roads is the money that we get through that program, and that has been a blessing. We would not have done anywhere near what we have done if we didn't have funding to back up what we would like to do. And I know that there are states that struggle with that. There are a lot of states where local agencies don't get much of that safety funding, but that has been a huge part of our program. Was just wise minds getting together long ago to say it only makes sense that if this share of our problem exists on local roads, that they should get that same share of funding to try and address it. And so that's it's been the basis of how we have addressed safety on local roads in our state for decades. Kevin Elliott 43:43 I'm really glad you mentioned that, because that is one of the early was one of the early things I heard about the state of Washington, that you all have done that for a very long time. And like you said, some lots of states struggle with that, trying to allocate that money that way, but, but this is just one of the reasons why Washington state is leading the way with others in the country to really get their arms around and and make real the idea that we are going to eliminate fatal and serious crashes everywhere they are in our state. Matthew, I think I've known you almost 10 years now, and you've always been you always got a great smile on your face. You're always cheerful. You're always, you know, out there pushing for safety, and it's, it's super admirable, and you're making a big impact. So I appreciate you taking the time out of your I don't know, three jobs or whatever it is, you have to come be on the to be on this podcast, and take courage and keep doing that good work. Matthew Enders 44:39 Thank you, Kevin. Really appreciate being here. It is challenging, but such rewarding. Work totally worth, totally worth doing. Kevin Elliott 44:46 It's a good way to spend a career. It is. Thanks for riding along with us on home safely. If you liked this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with others. Who care about making rural roads safer for more resources, training or upcoming events, visit us at rural safety center.org and until next time, stay safe. Stay connected, and let's all get home safely.