 Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota, produced by Lakeland PBS with host Bethany Wesley. Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airports, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for information available at BemidjiAirport.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswa Tax Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at NiswaTax.com. Hello, welcome back to Lakeland Currents. I'm Bethany Wesley. In 2003, the Minnesota Departments of Public Safety, Transportation and Health launched the Toward Zero Deaths Initiative, a collaborative interdisciplinary approach to making Minnesota roadways safer. 2018 marks the 15th anniversary of Toward Zero Deaths, or TZD, which aims to reduce traffic crashes, injuries, and deaths on Minnesota roads. The program ultimately aims to reduce the number of traffic fatalities and serious injuries to zero. While Minnesota's state agencies have long considered and implemented different traffic safety initiatives in the years prior to TZD, this program was unique. Here to tell us why, our Beltrami County Sheriff Phil Hodap and Lou Tassa, an assistant district engineer in state aid for District 2 of the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Welcome. Thanks for coming in. Take us back to what was happening. What prompted the state to start looking at Toward Zero Deaths and why they kind of started to look at implementing this program throughout the state? Prior to 2003, each department individually was trying to do their job, but it wasn't working as good. So they came together and decided to try a different initiative, one of which was started in Sweden back in, I think it was 1990, late 90s. So then they tried Toward Zero Death and tried to work together and figure that we could do a better job by working together than individually. Once you guys started talking, you guys have talked, I'm sure, over the years a little bit, but this was a really concentrated effort to sit down, look at these issues, and work together to try to address them, right? What happened when those first conversations started? Did you start to realize that there was a lot you could learn from each other? Well, I'm sure that initially that's what happened. We learned a lot from each other. We learned what could help each other do a better job. And then we found out that by working together, we could probably do a lot more to reduce these these traffic deaths and fatalities through some more collaborative efforts and focusing on certain behaviors of drivers. So that's what I think started it. And then they, as they found out, as they got more education is a big thing. So they started educating people on what the problems were, how they could reduce a lot of those issues that were like for up here, we got a lot of run off the road crashes. And even just saying crashes versus accidents, crashes means that it can be taken and prevented, but an accident isn't. So just some of those little subtleties like that can help to educate people about the seriousness of these crashes as a result in either death, which is the worst, and then serious injuries. So we talked about the departments that were involved, right? You have transportation, you have health, and you have DPS. There's also more involved, right? Because TZD talks a lot about those four E's, those four E's of involvement. Do you know those are engineering, their education, EMS, and then enforcement like law enforcement then, correct? That's right. So what is the Sheriff's Office role in this film? Well, it initially started when this whole idea was conceived. It was actually conceived at the Department of Transportation. And the idea, like Lou talked about, was to use kind of the terminology from the day it was breaking down the silos. But they conceived this idea, and like Lou said, they were using ideas developed over in Sweden. But they brought on the State Patrol and the Department of Public Safety in Minnesota, and then the Minnesota Department of Health, and then the Department of Education at the state level. Well then, as they met, they talked about doing this at the state level, and then quickly determined that they had their state silos and they needed to bring in the local agencies. So then they started looking at the Sheriff's Offices and Police Departments, the County Highway Departments, the local EMS agencies, you know, the Fire and Ambulance Departments in every county and city, and then the school districts and the colleges. And so in our area, MnDOT came to the County Sheriff's Office and the Police Department and the County Highway Department and BSU and to the Bemidji School District. And we also had Kellier and Black Duck School District involved for a while initially, and we formed a coalition here. And we actually got some grant dollars initially, and we started a TZD County-wide coalition. And we held some meetings and that went on for a couple years with some grant money that we got from the state. And then, after a couple years, we decided not to apply for the grant dollars any longer because we were having a tough time keeping up with the grant requirements. Yeah, we found that the grant requirements were a little bit tough for us to manage. But we continued to meet as a coalition, anyway, because we weren't getting much for grant dollars. We were kind of a small area. And so it was too much work to fulfill the grant requirements for what we were getting for grant dollars. Anyway, long story. But anyhow, but you had this local right. And once you formed on a local basis, you started looking at, I mean, you've always looked at your intersections, right, as you've had accidents and crashes. But once you had this local coalition formed, what did you start to see was happening when you would have these meetings? Did you start to realize that you could kind of piggyback off what other people were experiencing? Absolutely. I think we found it to be very successful. Our County Highway Department worked with Lou's department, and they worked on some very successful engineering projects. They were able to apply for some grants. And I think you guys worked together on several projects that redesigned several intersections. Maybe Lou, you want to talk about that a little bit. So let's talk about some of the intersections that we kind of have had problems with, right? Well, first of all, you know, we've got a county safety plan that was established statewide for every county. And what they did is they went through and looked at analyzed all the roads. And there's a certain criteria or characteristics of roads that would probably end up causing some crashes. So we it's kind of like picking the low hanging fruit. We get more bang for our buck if we can do some certain types of improvements that keep people on the road. Those include like the edge line rumble strips or the even center line rumble strips, the wider six inch edge line paint. And sometimes we painted that edge line right in the rumble strip. The other thing is like an intersection. So we like Phil was saying, you know, we lighted, put some lights, street lights up there. And that helps people when they're coming down in the rural areas, they can realize that they're coming up to an intersection and be a little bit more prepared. So all those things were figured out in this county safety plan when they analyzed all their roads. And so each road, depending on their traffic and the characteristics, then we could look at that data and determine what was the best fix? What was what could happen? What could we do there to make that road safer? So and it's instead of waiting for somebody to get hurt and saying, well, how many people have to crash or how many people have to die on this road? Now we can analyze these roads and these intersections based on this criteria. And then we can determine what is a good fix for it. And we've done a lot of those in Beltrami County has done a lot of them. I mean, they've taken care of all their roads for the edge line, rumble strips or most of them. Bruce has done a great job. And we've lighted the intersections and we've done probably over $10 million worth of improvements or these safety improvements since 2011 in the counties alone. Mendot has done other improvements as well. Oh, wow. That's interesting. I think we did our first county safety plan in 2008 as a result of the TZD coalition that we formed. And then there have been updated county safety plans since then. How often are they updated? Well, I'm not sure, but I think we're talking about doing another one here. Just starting right now. We're doing one this year now. They're updating it because the low hanging fruit has been picked. So now we're looking at other ones. Some of those include like these traffic, they're not signals, but they're like flashers and they warn people of traffic coming into the intersection. And I think there's one schedule to be installed in Beltrami County. There is one at County Road 50 down by, you know, coming into town on County Road 50, down by Lavelle Industries, you know what I'm talking about there. By the industrial park there. There's a brand new signal there. Do you find sometimes that when you, you call them low hanging fruits, but the easier fixes, you might do an easier fix. And then later on, you might find out that worked for a while, but now you have to improve it even further. It could depends on the traffic. If your traffic increases, but typically the low hanging fruit will get us more bang for our buck for a while. And then once you've done them all, then you can start looking at these more isolated spots where there might be more crashes involving either at intersection or in a curve of a road. We've also put up those chevrons. That's part of it as well. There's chevrons that go around curves and those help direct people at night and in Clement weather so that they can get around those curves and keep them on the road. We find if we can keep people on the road, at least we can keep them at least getting mysterious crash and maybe kill and maybe being killed because the next step is to try to educate everybody on seatbelts. We want people to use their seatbelts. That's a big thing. You need to buckle up, right? Absolutely. Buckle up. So when you look at these traffic patterns and you talk about the intersections that could use improvements to make them safer, are they based on current traffic patterns or do they predict out to what might be coming in the future? If there is some development or some generators of traffic we could look at out into the future. They do look a little bit into the future, but they look mostly at the current. Okay. And again, it's just like the roadway itself. If it's got wide shoulders and maybe there isn't as much of improvement needed, but if you got a lot of ADT, there's curves, then you wanted to use the rumble strips or the wider edge lines. People have commented on those edge lines that even in snow, they're easy to see the edge of the road. Okay. Make it easier, visible. Yep. So toward zero death has this ultimate goal of zero deaths on Minnesota roadways, right? Zero serious injuries make keep everybody safe. Do you think it's attainable? Do you think it's something that will actually is possible to reach? Well, I think it is. I mean, we've had a steady progression of reducing our fatal crashes. So you think it's working? I mean, you think that you've definitely made big waves and you've seen it because it's a data driven program. It's right. That's right. And so you've seen that those numbers are decreasing. Well, we've seen a terrific decrease. So our crashes this last year now in 2017. Now, we just have preliminary crash data and we won't have our final crash data until later in the year for 2017 because we're waiting to find out what our exact numbers are going to be for our fatal crashes. But right now we have our fatal crash data for today is at 357. Now, that's the lowest number since 1943. And it's lower than it was in 2016, which was a very low number. I think 16 was 392, right? So you're already going down another 40. I mean, right? You keep doing that trend and eventually you get lower and lower and hopefully... Well, since 2003, it's been reduced by 45% in our traffic fatality. So it's 655 in 2003. So if you reduce down to 357, that's a 45% decrease, which is significant. And it can work. It's just that we got to get everybody involved. It was asked of people down at the State Fair here a while ago about if they think it can be attainable. And when they said, you know, how many people are dying on the roads they didn't know in Minnesota roads, they'd say maybe a thousand, maybe a couple thousand. Yeah. And so then they say, well, then how many people is acceptable? Oh, maybe a couple hundred. So you go around, maybe anywhere from a hundred to a couple hundred or so. Then they say, well, in your family, how many people are acceptable for to die in your family? People that you love? Zero. Yeah. Right? Because it's easy to look at the data, right? It's easy to look, it's so much data, but it's easy to look at all these numbers. And it's sometimes easy to forget that they're people, right? People who are dying, people who are getting hurt. Right. So. Well, another significant statistic, I think very significant statistic from last year from 2017 is the fact that the seat belt fatalities have been reduced so significantly. In 2014, half of the fatalities that in that year were seat belt related people that weren't buckled in. So half of the people who died in crashes. In 2014. Weren't buckled. Weren't buckled. And in last year only 23% of the people died were not buckled. So that shows you that more and more people now are wearing their seat belts. That's in a three-year difference, right? So that's not a super long time. Right. But like Lou said, we're in a district up here where we still have a significant number of people that aren't wearing their seat belts. Statewide. We're an outlier, you know. Our district is. Statewide, I believe, the figure for belted people are about 94% in Minnesota. Is Beltrami not at 94%? I'm not sure what Beltrami is. It might be a little bit more, but our district as a whole is around 80%. Okay. So we put them all together and it's a little over 80% hovering around there. Okay. Our district is the northwest quarter. You have that 12 counties, right? 11 counties all in the northwest corner of Minnesota. Is that common in rural Minnesota, do you think, that the seat belt usage decreases versus like metropolitan? Or is it just in the just our district? There's another district that is similar to ours, but in its rural and I think some of it is due to being rural and people just get a little lackadaisical thinking there's not enough traffic out here, how am I going to get in any trouble? You know, I'm just going to the store or let them in air culture. They don't feel that they have to buckle up, but you know, it's not about really the law that says it's a we got a primary seat belt law and you're supposed to wear your seat belts, but it's not about that. It's about yourself and buckling up for yourself. And I try to tell people that, you know, now the way the cars are designed, there's a cage and that cage is there to help keep you from collapse us to the cage and it keeps you from getting seriously hurt. If you can stay in that cage, your chances of survival and no injuries is tremendously increased. And I think if people just understood that, that they're buckling up to help themselves out, not just because it's law. Well, and like Lou said, most of the crashes we see in the rural areas are single car runoff the road crashes. And then most of the deaths that we see are attributable to people who are not buckled in their seat who get ejected from the car and then they get killed because they get ejected from the car and the car rolls over them or something like that. Um, so, so if you are driving in rural Minnesota and you're one of the people who does not buckle yourself in, chances are you're not going to get hit by another car. You're going to fall asleep or you're going to, something's going to happen that's going to cause you to run off the road and you're going to roll, you might hit a field approach or something like that or hit a tree and you're going to get ejected and that's what's going to kill you or injure you with life-altering injuries. And that's the other thing we need to talk about. We're saving more and more people nowadays because of our terrific life support that we've got. You know, part of our TZD coalition is the medical piece of this, emergency medical services. And you know, in the rural areas, you know, in the last 15 years or so we've gotten all this wonderful help out here with helicopter support and advanced medical trauma support and our ability to get people to advance life support services so much quicker during the golden hour, you know, that we talk about being able to rescue people and save them. And that's great, but we have more and more people now who are surviving these crashes with unbelievably life-altering injuries that are, you know, terrible things to have to live with. And like Lou said, if you are buckled into the car and you get in a crash, the car is designed so that you have room to live inside that car. And the likelihood that you're going to get that life-altering injury is so much reduced because of the air bags and the seat belt and the cockpit that you're in. Okay. And that little kind of bubble area. The way the cars are designed, they've got the crush zones and stuff that you're so much better off to be in that seat and buckled in and to stay in there than you are getting thrown around inside there and not buckled in. Okay. It's stable. It reduces your chance for some kind of catastrophic. It greatly increases your chance to survive with little or no injury. Okay. So we've talked about it's a statewide initiative. You also have these coalitions at the county or the district level, right? Your local levels. But you also have chances not only as a coalition, but you have special trainings throughout the year or at least occasionally in the year, right? You have like a big workshop? We have a workshop, yes. And what happens at that workshop? How is that different than like a coalition meeting? Well, I mean, the workshops are a little bit more involved with we get some speakers and talking about actual things that have happened to them. Okay. The coalitions as Phil can speak more. Yeah, the coalition is basically what we do is we just do a fatality review of our local fatal crashes and we do an analysis of we go through our crash review basically and we do an analysis so we go through the crash and we figure out who was involved in the crash, you know, the drivers, the passengers, pedestrians, the number of types of vehicles that were involved, you know, analyze with the engineer the roadway surface, you know, weather conditions, any of the contributing factors that might have been involved with the roadway or an intersection or, you know, what kind of signage, any of that kind of stuff that might have been involved, you know, the time of day, the weather conditions, the human factors that contributed to it, you know, alcohol, speed, drugs or anything, things like that distraction, you know, that's a place to use a huge part in a lot of crashes nowadays, you know, then seatbelt use or non-seatbelt use, that kind of stuff. Delayed response time, like in the case of motorcycles, whether or not there were helmets being used, environmental factors that might have been involved, like the grade, you know, if it's a gravel road, all that kind of stuff. So you just look at these stats and really dig into what happens. Yeah, we really dig into the cause of the crash and we talk through it, then we talk through the EMS response, and we talk through any potential educational pieces there might be, you know, and of course we need to be very careful about, we're talking about local fatalities. So we've got to be cognizant of the fact that there's families involved. So we've got to be careful about that. The other thing we have to be careful about is whether or not there's a criminal case. If it's still an open criminal case, we generally have to put off this analysis of the case until the case is adjudicated, you know. Okay, so I know that you have a workshop coming up here then in Maine, right? It's River Falls. Correct. What do you hope to, what do you, when you go into a workshop like this, then what do you hope to accomplish? Is it to spread awareness of what toward zero death is? That's exactly. We want to spread that around. We want to get everybody to understand, you know, that what TZD is about, education is our next big effort. You know, we got to educate people because the more they know, the more they're going to be safe. We got to try to create a culture of safety where these, when you're driving, you know, pay attention to what you're doing. Don't speed. Don't use alcohol. Buckle up. And there's a fifth E that we're trying to get going now and that inks everybody. So everybody needs to be involved in this TZD. So you're saying it's not only collaborative throughout the state and local, but you need the public to also buy into this? You need the public to buy in, yes. And then if we get everybody to buy in, we'll be at zero. Oh, interesting. Great. Final thoughts in terms of where you think you might be going in the future. Do you think that it'll continue to be strong and you'll continue to gain some support then from the public as you go? The more we can get it out like this and having these kinds of conversations, we go out and meet with the public in different venues. I mean, the more we can get it out there, the better. And I think it's going to start to grow. It'll still keep its energy and we'll be getting to zero sooner than later, hopefully. Well, thank you guys for joining me. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you for tuning in. Please join us next time on Lakeland Currents.