Vision Zero San Jose hits the streets

Since last year, I have been working with a team from the City of San Jose as it begins implementing the city’s Vision Zero initiative. As some of our readers will recall, San Jose declared last May that it would begin the fight to reduce its roadway fatalities and major injuries to zero.The work to achieve this goal has been an enlightening experience. We have taken a close look at fatality and injury collisions along San Jose’s 14 Safety Priority Streets – the 3% of the roadway network that accounts for 50% of the city’s fatal crashes. Our recommendations thus far have consisted of the mundane – refreshing faded paint and upgrading signals to modern-day standards – to the progressive – constructing a two-way cycletrack between neighborhood parks.Our observations and recommendations will be compiled into reports on each of the corridors, and many of those points will make it into the Department of Transportation’s annual traffic safety report, presented to the Transportation and Environment Committee in May.

We will also be reaching out to community organizations, neighborhood groups, community centers, churches, and others in neighborhoods near the subject streets to share what we have learned and ask for local ideas for not only improving engineering, but also better using limited law enforcement resources and improving public awareness of safe driving, biking, and walking behaviors. If you have an upcoming meeting or other event and you would like your participants to get involved in Vision Zero San Jose, please contact me at colin@bikesiliconvalley.org.By September, our team of safety experts will produce a two-year action plan for San Jose’s Vision Zero implementation. The document will clearly outline strategies (things like how to spend limited engineering and enforcement funds) and milestones (deadlines for the many things we hope to accomplish) to guide the city’s efforts through 2018.I’ve been joined in this endeavor by Jaime Fearer of California Walks. Our two organizations co-authored the Vision Zero Toolkit and we continue to believe that a safe environment for walking and biking is a safe road for everybody. The City of San Jose has been proactive about integrating Vision Zero into its departments' workplans and finding funding to enhance the initiative. The City is implementing this latest round of Vision Zero analysis and outreach thanks to a generous Partnership to Improve Community Health (PICH) grant through the Santa Clara County Department of Public Health.