Delaware’s Office of Highway Safety is hosting a series of public forums to collect feedback on keeping roadways safe.
The public town hall meetings will address things like impaired driving, pedestrian safety, and speeding. OHS wants community feedback to ensure its future initiatives are engaging, relevant, and motivational.
OHS Community Relations Officer Meghan Niddrie says they want to know how to improve communication with drivers, cyclists,and pedestrians to get important safety messaging across.
“We’re looking to hear about their highway safety concerns, and then the specific message that they think would reach their community better and what they would want to see from us," Niddrie says.
Niddrie adds this is a new initiative to interact with the public. OHS is looking for new ways and ideas to address record roadway fatalities – a total of 165 last year.
“It’s definitely a hot topic right now," Niddrie says. "It’s not a good thing to see and it’s very unsettling. And we really want to see those numbers start to go down. So this is our way of saying, ‘Okay, so tell us what do we need to do to get these numbers to go back down?’”
Niddrie says the information they collect will go into their annual Highway Safety Plan and be used to develop messaging for specific communities.
The first forum is in Sussex County at the Georgetown Public Library from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 19.
Ones in Kent and New Castle follow on Tuesday, September 26 at the Modern Maturity Center in Dover and Wednesday, September 27, at the Route 9 Library & Innovation Center in New Castle, both from 6 to 7:30 p.m.
