COLUMBUS – The city of Columbus is getting $12 million from the federal government, which it plans to use to improve a portion of Livingston Avenue that has become a dangerous stretch of roadway for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians.
That is the city’s share of over $800 million in federal grants to improve the safety of streets and intersections that were announced by the U.S. Department of Transportation Wednesday.
The competitive grants include nearly $590 million to carry out 37 projects making physical safety improvements to roadways in 22 states.
An additional nearly $213 million is being distributed in smaller increments for hundreds of traffic safety planning efforts across the country.
The city plans safety improvements on Livingston Avenue west from 18th Street to Nelson Road aimed at lowering speeds and reducing pedestrian, fatal, and serious injury crashes.
The plan includes include lane reconfiguration and “road diets,” which use reduced or narrowed driving lanes, curb extensions, “bulb-outs,” bike lanes, pedestrian medians, landscaping, and other relatively low-cost interventions to improve safety and traffic flow.
“From 2014 to 2018, crashes involving people walking and bicycling along the project corridor accounted for approximately 73% of all fatal and serious injury crashes that were reported, and the entire project corridor is identified as a high-stress corridor for bicyclists,” transportation officials wrote in a release announcing the grants.
The Livingston Avenue West corridor runs through historically Black communities redlined in the 1930s or demolished by the interstate system in the 1960s.
The grants are the first under the Safe Streets and Roads for All program, which ultimately will provide $5 billion over five years.
The program was part of the federal infrastructure law passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in 2021.