The NC Alliance for Safe Transportation held four Traffic Safety Summits around the state last month, and we’re blown away by the participation.

In Raleigh alone, 80 people packed a hotel conference room. Dozens more attended summits in Asheville, Statesville and Wilmington. Law enforcement, planning officials, engineers, advocates and safety researchers spent five hours in each location hearing presentations and sharing ideas.

NCAST will compile those ideas into a white paper to share with NC General Assembly members going into the 2027 legislative session. It may make sense to combine some of those ideas into a broad transportation safety bill for lawmakers to debate, NCAST Executive Director Joe Stewart said.

“It was heartening to hear from so many people in this space,” Stewart said. “We will do a good job drawing up summaries and recommendations.”

Sen. Vickie Sawyer, a Senate Transportation Committee chair, moderated three of the summits and said she heard clearly from advocates that they want better funding for safety projects and more flexibility for local planners to implement safer designs.

“Some of what we heard would probably require retooling the Strategic Transportation Investments formula that’s used to divide up transportation funding," Sawyer said. "That's a heavy legislative lift, but the time has come to make that push. We also heard a lot of interesting smaller ideas. I want to look closely at NCAST's final report, but perhaps many of these ideas can be strung together in a bill to tweak state policies in ways that significantly improve safety."

Sawyer added that the summits reinforced her feeling that the General Assembly needs to make the increased Spot Safe funding included in the 2026 state budget permanent and to improve safety project delivery times by reducing unnecessary regulatory barriers.

Sen. Michael Lazzara, also a Transportation Committee chair, moderated the Wilmington summit.

"The people in that room cared," he said. "That was clear, and that's a great thing. We took notes, and we will follow up.”

Lazzara agreed with Sawyer that, “it’s probably time to revisit how the state scores transportation projects and decides what to fund.”

“We don't have enough transportation funding in general, partly because labor and material costs have increased so much, but the current formula gives short shrift to local projects,” Lazzara said. “That doesn't just affect safety projects, but it certainly leaves less funding for them."

A lot of people put a lot of time and effort into these summits, including researchers from the UNC Highway Safety Research Center and the NC State Institute for Transportation Research and Education, who opened each summit with a presentation on the science of safety and how to change human behavior.