San Jose must prioritize making its streets and roads safer, states Councilmember Pam Foley
San Jose has a traffic safety problem, City Councilmember Pam Foley writes in an opinion piece published today by the San Jose Mercury News.
“Last year was one of the deadliest years on record for our city, with 65 fatalities on our streets,” Foley writes. “Since adopting our Vision Zero Action Plan in January 2020, which aims to eliminate all traffic fatalities, we have had 180 traffic fatalities. These aren’t just data points. These are our neighbors, people who had friends and family. These losses leave holes in our community that cannot be filled.”
Foley urges that the city staff, council, and Mayor Matt Mahan, during the budget process currently under way, prioritize Vision Zero funding both for infrastructure that improves road safety for all users, and for staffing to ensure the work is done.
Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition has been actively supporting this goal, in a campaign focusing community and city leadership attention toward the importance of city funding for street safety infrastructure.
See SVBC’s most recent update and learn how you can have impact.
Foley, who represents the city’s 9th District, notes that at every meeting of the Vision Zero Task Force, she reads the names of the people who lost their lives to traffic violence since the last meeting, as a somber reminder of the importance of making streets safe.
“This problem is deeply troubling, urgent and almost entirely preventable,” she states. “We know from the data that speeding is the No. 1 cause of roadway fatalities. The risk of a pedestrian being killed in a collision is 10% if hit by a vehicle traveling at 20 mph. It jumps to 50% at 30 mph and 90% at 40 mph. To make the problem worse, most of the major streets in San Jose are designed to facilitate fast automobile speeds that are not conducive to safe streets. People, especially the safety of people, need to be prioritized over traffic flow.”
“We know that human error will always be present, and so we need to design our streets so that an error that results in a collision doesn’t turn into a fatality.” — Pam Foley, 9th District San Jose City Councilmember
“We know the solution to this problem. Enforcement of our traffic laws is one element, along with education and outreach on the importance of driving safely. However, changing the design of our streets through physical infrastructure is the only way to create lasting change. We know that human error will always be present, and so we need to design our streets so that an error that results in a collision doesn’t turn into a fatality.”