Austin's Vision Zero wraps 2016 mobility bond safety projects

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Nearly a decade after the creation of Austin's Vision Zero program, the transportation safety initiative celebrated the completion of its first round of bond-funded safety projects.

Vision Zero centers around mobility safety improvements to reduce serious and fatal injury crashes in Austin. In 2016, Austin voters approved a mobility bond that included a $15 million allocation to safety projects to be completed via Vision Zero.

Joel Meyer, acting transportation safety officer with Vision Zero, said the program knew it had an ambitious goal ahead of itself in its quest to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities across town. However, in the eight years since voters approved that bond package, he said data collected by the program has found a noted improvement in lowering those crash counts.

Through the program, Meyer said Vision Zero has taken a more holistic approach toward transportation improvements, focusing on investments that not only benefit drivers but pedestrians, cyclists and other forms of commuters.

"Any time we look at a street or an intersection, we want to make sure we're improving safety and mobility for all people, regardless of how you get around town," he said. "And we know that people on bikes, people on scooters, people walking, are overrepresented in the crash data and they're particularly susceptible to these serious injuries and fatalities."

Those 2016 bond dollars focused on upgrades such as crosswalks separating pedestrian and vehicular traffic, shared-use paths for non-vehicle traffic as well as enhancements to signal timing or street lighting.

As the program has evolved in the past near-decade, Meyer said Vision Zero's approach has evolved from a larger-scale, more robust intersection reconstruction work to lower-cost treatments that data analyses have shown to be effective.

Some of those lower-cost means of safety improvements can be as simple as restriping an intersection or tweaking a signal's timing, Meyer said. Despite the relative simplicity of those changes, some of those have led to substantial crash reductions — particularly those resulting in serious injuries or deaths.

"I think a big focus of ours early on — especially with 2016 bond funding as we were getting started — was really these sort of major intersection reconstruction efforts. And the data is showing that those have been successful in reducing injuries and fatalities," he said. "But when we look at the data a little more closely, we can kind of start to parse out which treatments are the most effective, and especially those that have the highest cost benefit."

Some of those with the most bang for their buck include traffic signal timing changes, leading pedestrian intervals (LPIs) and protected left-turn lanes.

Over the next three years, Vision Zero will be tackling a dozen more intersection safety projects courtesy of the city's 2018 and 2020 mobility bonds. In the interim though, Meyer said those lower-cost treatments are also resources in the city's toolkit to address mobility safety across the city, even beyond those major improvement initiatives.

"As we've gone through spending bond dollars, we've tried to touch more intersections across the city, and we've also evolved the way that we've prioritized the intersections that we treat," he said.

That includes looking beyond crash history and frequencies of more severe crashes but also analyzing areas that have more substantial pedestrian and cyclist activity as well as which communities might be historically disenfranchised and in need of additional assistance.

"We always knew that Vision Zero is a big, bold goal, right? And it's going to take a lot of years of investments to really turn those numbers around," he said. "What we've seen from our data is that the investments that we've been making as a community in improving safety are really reducing crashes and injuries and fatalities, and so we just know that we need to continue to make those investments across the city."

For more information about Vision Zero, click here.