Vision Zero: Reducing Serious Injuries and Fatalities
Vision Zero: Reducing Serious Injuries and Fatalities on Salinas Streets
What is Vision Zero?
Salinas Vision Zero is the City’s strategy to will build safety into our streets, protecting the people who travel about the City every day. The Salinas Vision Zero Salinas policy acknowledges that traffic deaths are not inevitable but are preventable.
Why do we need it? Many Salinas residents have lost their lives while traveling on Salinas’ streets. These deaths and serious injuries are unacceptable and the City of Salinas is committed to preventing further loss of life.
What does it mean? The City adopted Vision Zero as a policy on February 11, 2020, committing to build safer streets, educate the public on traffic safety, enforce traffic laws, and to develop a Salinas Vision Zero Action Plan that save lives. The goal of the Salinas Vision Zero Action Plan is to create a culture that prioritizes traffic safety and to ensure that traffic-related accidents on our city streets don’t result in serious injuries or death.
Vision Zero Action Plan
- Community Engagement
Vision Zero Policy
At its February 11, 2020 meeting City Council passed a Resolution (No 21791) adopting a Vision Zero Policy, and to develop a Vision Zero Action Plan.
“Vision Zero” is a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all. It is a movement that began in Europe and spread to American Cities, rooted in the philosophy that no loss of life due to road crashes is acceptable or inevitable and therefore sets the goal of reducing fatalities and severe injuries to zero. Nearby cities such as Monterey, Watsonville and San Jose have all adopted a Vision Zero Policy. Vision Zero is a multidisciplinary approach, bringing together diverse and necessary stakeholders to address this complex problem. Vision Zero acknowledges that many factors contribute to safe mobility not just roadway design, but also speeds, behaviors, technology, and policies, and sets clear goals to achieve the shared goal of zero fatalities and severe injuries.
Vision Zero Integrated into Maintenance (VZIM)
Let’s face it the City does not have an unlimited budget. So what is the most cost-effective way the City can invest funds to make incremental safety improvements towards achieving a Vision Zero Goal?
Vision Zero Integrated into Maintenance (VZIM) is one of the most cost-effective ways the City can make investments in traffic safety. Vision Zero is a multidisciplinary approach to eliminate severe and fatal collisions, but an often-overlooked program with a substantial opportunity to make incremental safety improvements in the City’s pavement maintenance program. What is the difference between the City’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP) and the City’s maintenance program? Reconstructing roads often involves moving flow lines, upgrading drainage systems, rebuilding sidewalks, relocating utilities, and planting trees, all of which is very expensive. Resurfacing, restoration, and rehabilitation (3R) projects are typically regularly planned maintenance projects, initiated on the basis of current or anticipated pavement conditions. Maintenance funds are already programmed and making striping changes has a nominal cost to the City. Because of the low additional cost to the City, VZIM is by far one of the most cost effective approaches to improving traffic safety.
When a 3R project is planned the City is given a blank canvas to determine how best to restripe the roadway. This is an opportunity to implement desirable improvements, reduce crash frequency and severity, and improve traffic operations. Below are examples of some of the restriping improvements that can be made with a 3R project:
Centerlines
Skinny Lanes
High Visibility Crosswalks
Bike Lanes
Channelization of Turn Lanes
Road Diet
Want to learn more about they City's Pavement Management Program? Click here: Engineering
Vision Zero Network
Vision Zero Action Plan and Technical Appendix
Vision Zero Action Plan September 2021 Council Action
Vision Zero February 2020 Council Action
Vision Zero Public Meetings