Vice Mayor Caity Maple was preparing to present an emergency declaration at last night's Sacramento City Council meeting. The city has been suffering under the highest car crash fatality rate among large cities in California, and the Sacramento Bee recently reported that the county as a whole is the fourth worst in the state - 13.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2022.
But in the end she didn't do it. The declaration wasn't quite ready, she said, because the Mayor and the council first had to decide which committee to route it to, and there would be a "round-table discussion" on the topic before it could be presented.
Maple's proposal as currently written [PDF] would 1) Declare an emergency in the face of rising injuries and fatalities, 2) Create a public information campaign, 3) Increase traffic enforcement, 4) Reaffirm the city's commitment to Vision Zero, 5) Prioritize a planned audit on pedestrian safety, and 6) Work on creating ‘quick-build’ and ‘tactical urbanism’ improvements in high-risk areas
An emergency declaration is appropriate, said the advocates present at the meeting, but this proposal is ineffective, off the mark, and not anywhere near enough.
"We need this," said Kiara Reed, of Civic Thread, "and we have advocated for it." But the current proposed declaration "won't get us what we need," she said. "Roadway design is an effective way to reduce traffic fatalities, and this should be a priority."
"In addition, we reject an increase in policing. The council needs to focus on equity, and on countermeasures that actually reduce fatalities. It also needs to fund the Public Works department to address design flaws."
Isaac Gonzalez of Slow Down Sacramento told the council that this could be "a pivotal moment in the escalating crisis. We've all along advocated for quick-build, to transform our built environment quickly, physically reshaping our streets to passively encourage safety without the need for increased law enforcement," he said.
In a letter to the council, Sacramento Area Bike Advocates (SABA) executive director Debra Banks wrote that "We find ourselves wanting to support the City and these efforts, yet, without the funding needed, we can expect little action and glacial change, which will result in more injury and death. Our ask for you is to take Vision Zero seriously, prioritize equity and mobility justice, fund a quick-
build program, fund Public Works to redesign the built environment so that we can see behavior change that will result in fewer deadly collisions, and empower the Active Transportation Commission to help uphold Vision Zero for the City of Sacramento."
Civic Thread, Slow Down Sacramento, SABA, Strong SacTown, and other advocacy groups have been recommending a series of changes to make the city's streets safer, but they have been frustrated at what they say is a lack of interest on the part of the most of the council.
Some of them participate on the city's Active Transportation Commission, which advises the city council. Last year the commission produced a report with specific street safety recommendations for the city. These included increasing funding for active transportation infrastructure, developing a citywide Safe Routes to School program, lowering speed limits and adding traffic calming, creating a quick-build bikeways program, re-establishing the city's slow and active streets efforts, and finalizing the city's construction detour policy to keep pedestrians and bike riders safe around construction sites.
The recommendations, which the commission said would cost about $10 million total, were supported by the city council but turned down by city manager Howard Chan in the final budget process.
The commission's 2024 report, due out soon, will likely contain the same recommendations.
While the advocates are glad the topic has been brought up - because it needs to be addressed - they're also hoping that they and others will have opportunities to help shape a final declaration, because, as Dan Allison of Getting Around Sacramento said at the meeting, "This is indeed a public health crisis. More people are dying from traffic violence than any other preventable cause."
Allison had outlined objections to the current wording of the proposal in the blog, Getting Around Sacramento:
Emergency: You bet its an emergency. But it is really a public health crisis, when government allows people to die and be severely injured on our streets, without taking any meaningful action to protect people. Road safety is not the right term, traffic violence is.
Education: Education is not a real solution. Despite the preference for government to address issues with ‘education.’ there is almost no research to indicate that education of the public has any real effect on either driver behavior or safety outcomes. California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) love ‘education’ because it absolves them of taking action. Neither agency has been able to produce data supporting the expenditure of funds on these programs. Drivers know when they are violating the law. They decide to violate the law because road (mis)design encourages them to, and they know there are rarely consequences for doing so.
Enforcement: I am one among the crowd of transportation advocates who do not see law enforcement as contributing to safety on our streets. Police have used traffic law to oppress people of color and low income. Always have, and I believe, always will. It is in their nature. The SacBee article mentions that police blame pedestrians (people walking) for most crashes. This is a known bias in crash reporting, that the police routinely absolve drivers and blame walkers, made easy by the fact the walkers are often dead and cannot tell their side of the story. The recent police crosswalk enforcement action actually highlights the problem with law enforcement. They used overtime pay from OTS to carry out this program. The rest of the year? Nothing. Police do not enforce driver failure to yield to walkers unless they get extra money for it. They really do not care about the safety of people outside cars, except as an afterthought. The one effective and, if properly implemented, equitable solution to traffic violations is automated enforcement, but this is not mentioned in the list, and the city (police and staff) is pretty uniformly opposed to it.
Vision Zero: VZ in Sacramento has been a failure. We don’t need to recommit, we need to rethink. The focus on corridors and refusal to address intersections in the VZ Action Plan mean that unsafe intersections are not addressed except if they are along a corridor.
Vice Mayor Maple mentioned a "roundtable discussion" that could help shape the declaration. She and advocates for housing and transportation and transit plan to meet on October 4 to find alignment on what it should say.
