The Southern Georgia Regional Commission and Valdosta-Lowndes Metropolitan Planning Organization have produced and released the annual VLMPO Crash Report for Fiscal Year 2018. Produced since 2007, this report is available to the public, community leaders and law enforcement agencies to determine how to improve safety for all users on roadways within the Valdosta Urbanized Area. The Valdosta-Lowndes Metropolitan Planning Organization is a multi-county, federally funded transportation planning agency for the Valdosta Urbanized Area. The VLMPO conducts long range and short range transportation planning in areas including: highways and bridges, public transit, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, and freight movement, among other areas. This report can be found on our website at http://www.sgrc.us/transportation-plans---studies.html.
 
This crash report is modeled after goals listed in the 2017 Georgia Highway Safety Plan and covers crash data from the past five years, 2013 to 2017. It analyzes trends for crash characteristics such as injuries, fatalities, manners of collision, contributing factors, and others. Further, new MPO Safety Performance Measures required by the Federal Highway Administration under the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) were adopted by the VLMPO in February 2018 to support goals developed by the Georgia Department of Transportation and are examined in this report. These safety performance measures include number of fatalities, fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT), number of serious injuries, serious injuries per 100 million VMT, and number of non-motorized fatalities and serious injuries. Speeding, tailgating, alcohol, and use of safety equipment are among the many significant contributing crash factors that this report addresses. In addition to vehicular crashes, bicycle, pedestrian, and motorcycle crashes, injuries, and fatalities over the past 5 years are discussed. The top twenty crash locations for both the City of Valdosta and Lowndes County are mapped and detailed in this report along with planned improvements for those locations.
 
Between 2013 and 2017, Lowndes County experienced 16,261 crashes. There was an increase in the number of crashes that occurred per year from 3,017 crashes in 2013 to 3,712 crashes in 2016 followed by a slight decrease to 3,208 crashes in 2017. Fatal crashes rose from 6 in 2013 to 20 in 2016 followed by a slight decrease to 19 fatal crashes in 2017. During the 2017 calendar year, a significant majority of crashes occurred under dry road conditions, and the most cited contributing factors were failure to yield and following too close.