1. Safe Streets, Healthy
Schools and Communities
Creating a Vision Zero Safe Routes to School Action Plan
Oregon Safe Routes to School Conference
Ashley Rhead
June 20, 2016
2. Our mission, vision, and core values
Committed to 5 core values to create a city that is:
• Safe
• Interconnected
• Affordable
• Vibrant
• Innovative
For all
Mission: deliver a high-quality
transportation system for Seattle
Vision: connected people,
places, and products
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3. Presentation overview
1. Vision Zero in Seattle
2. Vision Zero & Safe Routes to School
3. Safe Routes to School Action Plan
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7. Education
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Walk and bike safety education
for every 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade
student
Students learning to wait for WALK sign Student learning to bike safely
10. Presentation recap
1. Vision Zero tackles the streets with the worst
speeding and collisions
2. Vision Zero emphasizes education so
everyone knows the rules of the road
3. Vision Zero uses proven engineering and
enforcement tools that work
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This is our mission and vision, and our top core value is safety, where the SRTS program lives.
Vision Zero is our plan to end traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030.
Seattle is consistently recognized as one of the safest cities in the country, with a traffic fatality rate that rivals Sweden’s (at 3.2 per 100k people). Over the past decade, traffic fatalities have decreased 30% even as our population has grown. However, about 20 people lose their lives on our streets every year and about 150 people sustain life changing injuries. We can and must do better.
In February 2015, we adopted a Vision Zero plan with the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2030.
Engineering: low-cost designs emphasize safety and predictability, projects include safety corridors with road diets and spot improvement program with signal changes
Education: use partnerships to target risky behaviors like driving under influence (Lyft, Uber) and using a cell phone (AT&T “It Can Wait” campaign)
Enforcement: data-driven, monthly coordination meetings with police department to change behaviors we can’t address with engineering alone, direct enforcement resources to locations with SI/F collisions – for example map shown is what SDOT to SPD
Evaluation: before and after reports, partnership with Harborview Injury Prevention Research Center, Bicycle & Pedestrian Safety Analysis will help us become proactive not just reactive
Equity: fatal and serious injury collisions do not discriminate, City RSJI
Walking and biking to school for elementary school kids in Seattle has increased 60% over the past 10 years (15-24%). We’re making great progress, but most kids are still driven to school so we still have more work to do.
We have very few child pedestrian and bicyclist serious injury or fatality collisions (3 serious injury and 1 fatality in 2014), yet the fear of this leads parents to choose to drive their kids to school. A good reminder is this quote from a parent who was involved in a Safe Routes to School project at her child’s school: It has to feel safe to be safe. The perception of safety is just as important as the facts of safety. In many ways, our challenge is to tackle safety perceptions that keep families from choosing active transportation.
The 3 biggest ways our Vision Zero and SRTS programs in Seattle complement each other are by:
Partnering to tackle the most dangerous corridors in the city that have become major barriers to kids walking & biking to school. We’re working toward a paradigm shift that it’s okay to “Spend a Minute to Save a Life.” – most of the changes we make on a corridor only add a minute or two to travel times.
Legislative changes that make a big impact city-wide, like allowing the speed photo enforcement program and the current effort to reduce the default speed limit on arterial and non-arterial streets.
SRTS projects improve safety for everyone at all times of day, even though they were initiated for the primary purpose of improving safety for kids.
In 2015, I led the development of the City’s first Safe Routes to School Action Plan, called Safe Streets, Healthy Schools and Communities. The plan provides a framework for investing resources into school traffic safety over the next 5 years, and is one of the key steps toward achieving Vision Zero in Seattle.
Since 2012, Seattle has had a program to automatically enforce the 20mph school speed limit around a dozen schools. The Seattle City Council passed legislation requiring revenue from the cameras to be dedicated to safety improvements near schools. Our program is also funded by local levy funds and state/federal grants.
To develop the plan, we used public outreach and best practices research to develop 41 actions across the 5 E’s and I’ll cover just a few highlights.
One of the key themes you’ll hear in this presentation is that partnering with other entities is crucial to making these new programs happen. We have partnered with other City departments, the Seattle school district, and advocacy organizations to achieve more than we could alone.
One of the most exciting things to come out of the plan is walk and bike safety education for every 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade child in the district. This was achieved through a partnership with Seattle Public Schools and Cascade Bicycle Club, which is the bicycle advocacy organization for Washington state. We were able to identify a common goal and we each brought resources to the table to make this new program a success. To our knowledge, this is the first such program in the nation.
Prior to this new program about half of elementary schools received bike education each year and no schools had routine walking safety education.
We developed a prioritization process that ranks all schools for engineering improvements. We used PMP scores that quantify the built environment, collisions, and demographic data, and the results focus resources in communities of color. We will complete 9-12 projects per year.
Ranking all schools helps with communication to the public because we can help them understand why their school isn’t high on the list compared to all other schools in the city, and steer them toward other resources, like City grant programs that fund community-identified capital projects.
One of the key types of projects that the Vision Zero and SRTS programs implement are rechannelization projects that decrease the number of lanes and dramatically reduce speeds and collisions.
This example is in north Seattle on NE 75th St. In 2013, a family was struck by a drunk driver a few blocks from a middle school. The collision resulted in two deaths and two serious injuries, including a 10-day old child. SDOT reduced the travel lanes to one in each direction with a center turn lane and bike lanes. The results of this project are striking. The percent of people driving over the speed limit dropped by 60% and the number of collisions fell by half in just one year.
Like the example I just provided,
We regularly assess the effectiveness of the engineering and enforcement tools that we use.
For another example, in a before and after study of three schools where we had installed speed humps, we found that the percent of people driving over the speed limit decreased by 70-90%.
We’ve also found the photo enforcement program to be highly effective. The vast majority (95%) of people who receive a ticket don’t pay for another ticket – which means the cameras are changing behaviors and the program is working.
To sum up,
I’ve described to you the Vision Zero program in Seattle and how it works with and complements our SRTS program, and I gave an overview of our new SRTS Action Plan.
Some key takeaways are that the Vision Zero tackles the streets with the worst speeding and collisions that are barriers to kids getting to school, it emphasizes education so everyone knows the rules of the road, and it uses proven engineering and enforcement tools that work.
