San Diego Association of Governments is advancing a safer streets initiative to include the development of the first regional Vision Zero Action Plan.
Vision Zero is a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries while increasing safe, healthy, and equitable mobility for all. Vision Zero challenges the belief that traffic crashes are inevitable, instead of viewing them as preventable.
The regional transportation agency’s first Regional Vision Zero Action Plan will encompass 19 jurisdictions, 17 federally recognized tribes, and more than 3.3 million people in the San Diego area.
The data-driven plan, modeled on national and international best practices, will pinpoint high-risk areas for traffic fatalities and serious injuries.
“On average the San Diego region experiences more than 250 fatal crashes annually, with pedestrians involved in approximately one-third of these fatal incidents, which is unacceptable,” said Antoinette Meier, SANDAG senior director of regional planning. She added the agency’s board adopted a Vision Zero resolution in summer 2022. Since then, Meier noted that SANDAG has received two major grants.
“One is to improve traffic safety and advance the goals of the Vision Zero resolution by developing an action plan, which we recently kicked off which will identify where traffic fatalities and serious injuries are occurring with solutions (slower speeds, traffic circles, curb realignments) proposed for those areas,” she said.
“The other is a $400,000 state grant to develop a public awareness campaign around the rules of the road. Last year, the state passed laws to improve traffic safety for people driving, walking, and biking. We want to make sure everyone understands these rules and is practicing safe, driving, biking, and walking habits.”
“Our community deserves safer streets and we must prioritize improvements for our underserved communities who are disproportionately affected by traffic-related injuries and fatalities,” said SANDAG and County Board of Supervisor’s chairwoman Nora Vargas. “Advancing Vision Zero initiatives ensure a more inclusive transportation system that is critical to achieving greater equity in all of our communities.”
SANDAG has launched the Traffic Safety Dashboard, a new online tool with interactive maps and charts displaying transportation injury and fatality data. This dashboard acts as a central hub for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing traffic data. The agency is also updating the Regional Active Transportation Plan to improve walking and rolling connections for daily travel and recreation. This update will align the regional bikeway network with the Regional Plan and consider post-pandemic travel trends, including the increased use of eBikes.
Meier said a major part of SANDAG’s Vision Zero resolution called for the creation of a traffic safety dashboard which she noted is “built off data the state California Highway Patrol collects from local law enforcement on crashes, that can be used to create an interactive mapping tool allowing us to determine where the high-risk traffic areas are in the region.” The dashboard link is at https://opendata.sandag.org/stories/s/5f7y-nefe.
Regarding updating SANDAG’s regional active transportation plan, Meier said: “That plan was developed in 2010 and is our long-range plan for connecting regional bikeways that we’ve been implementing linking them with things like parks, job centers, and universities. But a lot has changed over the last 13 years. So we needed to update the transportation plan to account for those changes. We just kicked that off, and the updated transportation plan should be completed by early 2025.”
Meier added that SANDAG is also looking for feedback from the public on where dangerous traffic intersections and other stretches of road are. The link where people can submit their comments on that is at https://engage.sandag.org/saferstreets.
