Welcome

Written by Evelyn Blank

Welcome the Idaho Highway Safety Coalition.  This site provides tools and resources not currently available to groups and communities throughout the state as well as a way to connect with others who share in the goal of keeping people alive on Idaho highways, roads and streets.

In January a group of former seat belt coalition members, non-profit and business leaders met to discuss the foundation of the Highway Safety Coalition. The intent of the meeting was to expand our perspective on the coalition and to get advice about the form we see the coalition taking.
We discussed the four levels of coalition action: Steering Committee, Regional Task Forces, Coalition Building Work-shops and the Coalition Website. The focus group agreed that this approach seems effective. It was decided that we must be clear about what the Steering Committee roles and responsibilities are and what they are not. The message of the coalition needs to be statewide and supportive of regional and local efforts rather than directive.

Here are the main points we came away from the meeting with:

• The coalition will address statewide and local traffic crash issues focusing on behavior, infrastructure, and policy or law.
• An evaluation component will be developed to measure the effectiveness of the coalition and projects supported by the coalition.
• A public relations component will be developed.
• We discussed several domain names and eventually the Highway Safety Office settled on www.HighwaySafetyCoalition.org for simplicity and ease of remembering. (Because we ran into concerns about this domain name not being specific to Idaho, we will instead purchase www.idahohighwaysafety.org.)
• The Focus Group felt we are on the right track with the website, regional focus and coalition building project. It was an excellent meeting.