# A Blueprint for Community-Driven Traffic Safety: Bellingham's Transportation Commission Charts a Course Forward The Bellingham Transportation Commission met on September 10, 2024, to dive deep into the complexities of neighborhood traffic safety, balancing the technical demands of engineering with the lived experiences of residents who want their streets to feel safe for their families. What emerged was a thoughtful exploration of how a mid-sized city can systematically address traffic concerns while ensuring every neighborhood has a voice in the process. Chair Addie Candib called the meeting to order at 6:04 PM at the Pacific Street Operations Center, with commissioners Tim Wilder, Jamin Agosti, Cindy Dennis, Keith Moore, and Katy Scherrer present. The evening would prove to be one of the commission's most substantive discussions of the year, as staff presented a refined framework for the Neighborhood Traffic Safety Program (NTSP) and provided updates on major capital projects reshaping Bellingham's streetscape. ## The Neighborhood Traffic Safety Program Takes Shape The centerpiece of the evening was Shane Sullivan's presentation on the evolved NTSP framework—a program that has been in development for over a year as the city works to revive its approach to residential traffic concerns. Sullivan, the city's transportation engineer, walked commissioners through a systematic process designed to move beyond the old model of responding to complaints as they came in, toward something more proactive and equitable. "This program is a hundred percent community driven," Sullivan emphasized. "Any location that we end up studying will have to have come from the community first." The proposed system divides Bellingham into four geographic groups of roughly equal population, allowing staff to focus intensive outreach efforts on one quadrant each year. This means every neighborhood would get concentrated attention once every four years—a deliberate choice to make the program manageable while ensuring comprehensive coverage. Sullivan outlined an eight-step process that would begin each January with intensive community engagement in the selected area. The three-month outreach period would generate an initial list of locations where residents have traffic concerns. Then comes the crucial screening phase, where engineering staff would narrow potentially hundreds of requests down to about …