On Thursday, May 7, 2026, the Los Alamos Transportation Board met at 5:30 PM in Council Chambers (1000 Central Avenue) with a hybrid Zoom option. Chair David Hampton presided. The board received a comprehensive traffic safety update, a Bike Month presentation, a county budget overview from the Council Liaison, and a staff report. The meeting lasted approximately two hours.
Traffic Safety Update (Presenters: Deputy Public Works Director Keith Wilson and Police Chief Scambalone)
Bike Month (Presenter: Keith Wilson)
Council Liaison Report (Councilor Halfman)
Staff Report (Public Works Director Eric Martinez)
Alright, it's 5 30, so the meetings call the order. And I'll do a quick roll call. Member Chappelle, Member Connolly, Member Zowski, Member Gebert Kleinrath, and Member Hampton in uh in person. And Member Edwards online. Member Muck is absent. Does anyone have any comments on the agenda or changes? Alright, the agenda's approved unanimously. Is there any public comment for items on the agenda? I assume no since there's no public. Does anyone have anything to say about the minutes from March 5th? All right, minutes are proved unanimously. And with that, we'll get to our first presentation. Good to go. Good evening. Keith Oakley, Deputy Public Works Director here with me this evening is Chief Scambalone. Did I get that right? Nailed it. And so we're gonna give you. So there's been some recent events, obviously, that is from fatality a month or so ago. And council asked us to put together a presentation of all the traffic safety uh efforts that we've been doing over the last little while. So this is kind of like a report back to transportation board, and then next week we'll give this presentation to the county council. Um it's just what it's gonna do is I'll give a quick overview, some summary of the crash statistics that I've gleaned from the crash records we received from the night with DOT, just some highlights of that data, and then go kind of through a series of the projects that we have underway or have completed crash data. So what what happens with crashes is uh the police department, typically the police department probably about 99% of the crashes in Los Alamos County or Los Alamos County police, sometimes it's state police, sometimes it's Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department, but typically it's uh LED, they collect a crash report and they feed that data to New High School DOT. Um there's some rules around what's a legitimate crash. So DOT records crashes that are on the within the public right-of-way. And there's a $500 threshold of damage to a vehicle, so anything under that doesn't actually get isn't an official uh crash according to DO to the to the state the way it's written. Um PD does collect a lot more crashes than are reflected here. A lot of them either are less than that threshold, they're kind of like minor fender benders, or they actually occur in private property. So, like the parking lots of Smiths or any other private entity around town. So kind of one of the interesting things going through this process, the numbers I have are much less than if I pull the data from from PD for primarily that's that's the reason why. Um so this is uh being kind of like data fit from PD to actually UNM does that is all the uh records pulling together. So this is what they feed back to us. So when you look at a crash data, you don't want to just focus in on one incident on one year because you want to kind of build a pattern or look at uh multiple years of data to see if there's patterns that get built. Um so we've been we've got crash data from 2019 through 2025, so December 31st of this past year in that period. Umfortunately, we've we've had eight fatalities recorded uh in the county in that seven-year period, about 250 injuries and almost 640 property damage crashes only, and close to 900 crashes in that time period. Also in that time period, we've had eight pedestrian crashes. Uh unfortunately two have resulted in fatality and six injuries, and then in this first four or five months of this year we've had one pedestrian fatality, unfortunately, and one injury pedestrian crash. Um so we're kind of already in line with the kind of average numbers per year that we've been seeing. And then on the bicycle front, fortunately we've had no fatalities, but unfortunately we've had 25 injury crashes involving bicycles and just one property damage. And as I say, when we're looking at crash data, we don't want to just focus in on one severity or one year or one day or one week or one month. So what we try and do is we look at our three to five year average for crashes to get those rates. So the table below that first big one is basically we're looking at the crash rates per the average number of crashes per year during the five-year period. So in general, we average one to a little over one fatalities per year. Um 35, 36 uh injury crashes and close to you know into the 90s for property damage. So on average we uh record around about 130 crashes per year, reportable crashes uh based on this thing. On the pedestrian front, we're around about 0.2 fatalities per year, and injuries about one uh one injury pedestrian involved crash a year, and then on the bicycle front, it's around about four, just a little over four bicycle involved crashes per year when we're looking at five-year averages. Um then how do we kind of judge ourselves? Uh it's kind of hard, but probably one of the easiest ways just by looking at population. Um it's not perfect, but it's probably kind of the quickest way that we can do it. So the the charts on the or the tables on the on the right-hand side are basically comparing Los Alamos Counties per pop per thousand population with the state as a whole, and in general, um we are quite a bit lower than the state average.