By the end 2023, there was not a single day that a fatal car crash didn’t occur that year in Texas.
Or in 2022.
Or in 2021.
Or in 2020.
Or in 2019.
The list goes on until Nov. 7, 2000 — the last day in Texas without a road death. Ever since, there’s been at least one deadly collision in the state that has extinguished futures. Every single day.
The statistics of traffic-related deaths that occur on a daily basis shouldn’t be ignored. The statistics demand a resolution.
By envisioning a future void of any more deaths on the road, the Dallas City Council proposed the Dallas Vision Zero plan in 2019. “At that time, the city council passed a goal to eliminate traffic fatalities and then told the city staff to go develop a plan for how they were going to do that,” City of Dallas Chief Transportation Planner Kathryn Rush said. “Then we spent the intervening COVID years working on developing that plan and meeting internally.”
As one of the original developers of the Dallas Vision Zero plan, Rush initiated the program’s groundwork by helping to convene city departments and partner agencies, guiding crash data analysis and literature reviews in the process.
The development team has already established the plan’s fundamental goal — to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities and slice severe injury crashes in half by 2030.
“We’ve been on an upward trend over the past 10 or 15 years,” Rush said. “If we’re not aiming towards zero traffic-related deaths, what are we really even aiming at? And so right now, in order to try to make this shift in this direction happen, we’re trying to swing the pendulum to aim towards zero fatalities at the end.”
Considering historical Dallas traffic data, the urgency of implementing the Vision Zero plan becomes clear, as the city faces a disproportionate rate of traffic fatalities compared to other major U.S. cities.
“One of the things I think that we realized as we were still developing the plan, is just that Dallas needed this probably more than most every other city,” Rush said. “We are the ninth largest city in the U.S., but in terms of the number of traffic fatality crashes per person, we rank number one among the top 10 or the top 15 largest cities.”
To address these issues, Vision Zero initiative is implementing certain safety features to these corridors that lack adequate traffic provisions, specifically areas like highly-congested traffic corridors and intersections, as they account for a large percentage of collisions and injuries on roadways.
These measures include the addition of rapid flashing beacons, pedestrian hybrid beacons, crosswalk countdown timers and a variety of other traffic signals that aim to increase driver awareness and improve overall public safety.
“To date, we have achieved about over $90 million worth of grants, which we’ve used to upgrade intersections,” City of Dallas Assistant Director of Transportation Auro Majumdar said. “But even though $90 million sounds like a lot, it’s not enough to upgrade all our older signals and intersections, mainly because most of Dallas was built before Vision Zero was ever dreamt of — the city was designed to be very car-centric.”
As his team works closely alongside the Vision Zero team in Dallas, Majumdar’s contributing efforts center on conducting traffic studies and using the extracted data to make corresponding enhancements that the studies identify, particularly surrounding pedestrian safety.
“The city actually has certain corridors which account for 62 percent of fatalities in severe crashes, and they’re only about seven percent of the total network,” Majumdar said. “Combined, these High Injury Network (HIN) corridors are identified in our original plan, but that’s not the only focus. We might also have intersections with high crash rates, so we’ll look at both. Currently we are very heavily focused on a few of the HIN corridors, including Loop 12, where we’re looking to reduce speed limits.”
Although the Dallas Vision Zero Action Plan has been launched, combined with the collaborative efforts of other transportation departments, both Rush and Majumdar anticipate looming challenges that will need to be addressed and eventually overcome.
For Rush, retrofitting the city is a challenging endeavor, as it is especially costheavy and time-consuming to complete. She also believes that conversations within the community, as well as general education on occasion, are additional requirements for the integration of new technology.
Majumdar shares similar concerns, as he agrees that in addition Dallas’s aged infrastructure that requires more energy to improve, other obstacles include balancing budgets and available workforces. And yet, Rush maintains an optimistic view on Vision Zero’s success down the road. In her eyes, the growing awareness of traffic safety will ultimately create momentum for more support.
“I think Vision Zero has started to completely shift the conversation about what our priorities are, from a traffic and transportation engineering standpoint,” Rush said. “The conversations that we have had with engineers were previously always about vehicle delay, with safety on the periphery — it wasn’t inherently about preventing fatal and severe injury crashes. Now, we’re willing to sacrifice delay if it means we’re saving lives. That should be our first priority and focus.”
