Houston has a plan to end roadway deaths. Now comes the hard part: pulling it off.
Mayor Sylvester Turner, joined by various department heads and city council members, announced Wednesday that the city has finished 14 months of work on its Vision Zero Action Plan, aimed at eliminating traffic deaths in Houston by 2030. The booklet provided for the plan starts off, Turner noted, with 1,153 names and ages — those killed in crashes since 2014 around Houston.
“Each of their names is one too many traffic deaths,” Turner said, touting the need to improve, not only safety for drivers, but anyone who uses the streets to walk, bicycle or travel by wheelchair or transit.
Though laced with projects and programs already underway, officials Wednesday called the plan transformative in setting a single objective that will carry through considerations made by city planners, public works, police and others.
“This is an intentional effort to say we are not doing good enough,” Police Chief Art Acevedo said.
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The plan comes at a time when traffic deaths abound in Houston and the region, despite a decline in driving this year caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As of Wednesday, 251 people have died in Houston this year, putting the city on pace for its deadliest year ever, beating the 266 last year, according to fatality data maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation. The majority of the deaths this year, 144, occurred on city streets.
Some city streets, however, are deadlier than others, based on an analysis of crash locations included in the plan that showed 60 percent of the fatal crashes in Houston happen on 6 percent of the city’s streets, often the busiest and most chaotic corridors in the region.
The city’s plan identifies 13 “priority actions” the city is committing to take. Among them:
construct at least 50 miles of sidewalks annually;
build at least 25 miles of dedicated bike lanes annually;
evaluate road projects for options to include sidewalks, bike trails and other amenities; and
redesign 10 locations with high numbers of incidents every two years, and make those changes within the following calendar year
Additionally, the plan calls on the city to train its employees on how to talk about crashes to avoid victim-blaming or playing down safety issues. It also calls for a detailed analysis on Vision Zero’s progress be made publicly available.
Turner, via an executive order, put Houston on the path to eliminate road deaths in August 2019. Fourteen months later, the plan reiterates many of the things officials and drivers have known are issues in Houston for years: Speed kills, pedestrians often are put in harm’s way by a lack of sidewalks and safe crossings, and too many wide streets encourage risky behavior.
“We have decades of infrastructure that was built the way it was built and it is going to take time to rebuild that,” Public Works Director Carroll Haddock said.
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Many of the commitments mirror previous plans to increase mobility or encourage walkability across Houston. Public Works often rebuilds streets and sidewalks simultaneously as part of capital programs, and Metropolitan Transit Authority has made sidewalks to transit stops a priority with its own funds. Developers often are required to rebuild critical sidewalk links and rebuild streets as part of new construction.
Still, there are elements long-sought by safety officials that could make crucial progress saving lives, said David Fields, chief transportation planner for the city. Previous plans did not expressly commit the city to building a certain amount of sidewalks or bike lanes, for example. Internally, the plan and its goals have led to changes in the city’s design manual that require rethinking all streets for pedestrians and the disability community.
“The priority has changed from moving automobiles as fast as possible,” Fields said.
The city is not alone in addressing roadway fatalities. Harris County, regional planning agency Houston-Galveston Area Council and the Texas Department of Transportation have pledged in the past two years to reduce or eliminate crashes. TxDOT has committed $600 million to safety improvements, such as cable barriers along freeways to avoid vehicles crossing into oncoming lanes.
dug.begley@chron.com
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Houston has a plan to end road fatalities. Now the work to implement it begins. - Houston Chronicle
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