The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) recently announced that the application process is now open for communities of all sizes to apply for $1 billion in funding to help ensure safe streets and roads and address the national roadway safety crisis.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s new Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) discretionary grant program provides dedicated funding to support regional and local plans, projects and strategies that will prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries.

The program supports the DOTs comprehensive approach, laid out in the National Roadway Safety Strategy (NRSS), to significantly reduce serious injuries and deaths on the nation’s roadways. This comes at a time when traffic fatalities are at the highest level in over a decade.

“We face a national crisis of fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways, and these tragedies are preventable – so as a nation we must work urgently and collaboratively to save lives,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The primary goal of the SS4A grants is to improve roadway safety by supporting communities in developing comprehensive safety action plans based on a Safe System Approach. It also looks to implement projects and strategies that significantly reduce or eliminate transportation-related fatalities and serious injuries involving motorists, commercial vehicle operations and other, according to the department.

Applications may come from individual communities, or groups of communities and may also include Metropolitan Planning Organizations, counties, cities, towns and others.

Read this PrePass blog about what the NRSS means for trucking.