Councilmember Hogg, do you mind turning on your camera, please?

Okay, well good afternoon, everybody.

You don't wreck your car as you're driving down the road for this stuff.

So everybody's doing well.

So everybody knows we're rebooting our computer system, so I'm waiting for a purpose.

Thank you.

Okay, we're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session of the Arlington City Council meeting to order.

We've just completed our executive session.

We're gonna move on down to three point one.

Ms.

Ann Foss, how are you for the transportation department?

I'm here today with the first annual report on the Safe Streets Arlington Plan, which focuses on improving roadway safety across the city.

So the Safe Streets Arlington plan was adopted in December of 24, and it used a foundation of both in-depth data analysis and extensive stakeholder engagement to develop a vision of safe streets for all roadway users and a goal to eliminate fatalities and serious injury crashes on Arlington roadways by 2050.

The plan uses something called the Safe Systems Approach, which was developed by the U.S.

Department of Transportation.

And it focuses on five key elements of roadway safety safe speeds, safe roads, safe road users, safe vehicles, and post crash care.

Some of these elements are more within the control of the city, such as the way we design roadways for safety, but other elements are really outside of the city's control, such as the design of vehicles.

But together, these elements demonstrate that roadway safety is a shared responsibility across our entire community, and it prioritizes a holistic approach to improving safety, where we dedicate city resources, we also build awareness from our residents, and we partner with community stakeholders to help incorporate safety throughout.

Just a quick recap of the plan itself.

And that's shown in the map on the right hand side of the screen.

This map identifies the roadway segments that have a higher likelihood of a fatal or serious injury crash, and this allows us to prioritize locations where safety improvements can have the biggest impact.

While we do see variation from year to year, overall we have seen an increasing trend in these fatal and serious injury crashes.

This chart focuses in just on the roadway fatalities.

Again, we see variation from year to year.

Unfortunately, I do have an update since these slides were posted last week.

We've had two more fatalities reported.

So the total to date for 2025 is 29 traffic fatalities.

We do hope that this number remains as low as possible as we finish up this year.

And then also to provide a little bit of context, this chart puts the Arlington fatal crash data from 24 into context with several other Texas cities.

So in 24, Arlington had 37 traffic fatalities, which is just over nine per 1,000.

I'm sorry, 100,000 population.

And so you can see how Arlington stacks up compared to some of the other large cities in Texas and some of our peer cities here in the Metroplex.

One component of the plan and of improving roadway safety more generally is enforcement of traffic rules.

This helps to ensure safe speeds and safe road users as part of our safe systems approach.

As council has seen previously, the Arlington Police Department has increased enforcement activities in recent years, as well as significantly in this current year to help improve safety on our roadways.

And so the next part of the presentation, I want to move into a review of the progress that we've made so far on implementing the action items recommended in the plan.

One of the key deliverables from the plan was the creation of a publicly accessible safety dashboard.

There are four different interactive pages on this dashboard.

There's a page that has the high injury network, so you can drill in and see all of those roadway segments that have a higher likelihood of serious crashes.

And there's also an interactive crash map.

This now contains all crash data from 2018 through 2024.

The data is very interactive.

You can click on each dot and get a lot of information about an individual crash.

You can also filter using this map tool and a lot of different characteristics from the crash reports.

So if you wanted to look at all crashes that happened in your neighborhood on Saturdays in dark conditions, it's very easy to click a few buttons and see that data on the map.

Additionally, we have a page that has public comments that we received during the planning process last year.

If you want to drill into some of the feedback that we got from the community.

Some of these are annual items, like this annual report to council, as well as updating the safety dashboard with each new year of crash data.

Some of these are actions that city staff have incorporated into business as usual, such as using the high injury network to prioritize projects and using crash data to direct enforcement activities.

Others are things that are ongoing and being folded into the work that we do, such as education and outreach events and social media posts about roadway safety.

We have also formed an implementation team, which has representatives from 15 different city departments, and this group will be meeting quarterly to guide implementation activities and ensure that safety is considered throughout the organization.

Just to highlight some of these specific activities, city staff have applied for a total of four safety-related grants so far this calendar year, including a safe streets and roads for all implementation grant that would allow us to construct safety improvements at the Mansfield Web and Silo Road Intersection Project.

We did just find out yesterday that we were not selected for the TechStot Transportation Alternative Set Aside program that's listed here, the fourth bullet, but we will continue to target this opportunity in future years.

We have a package of several different proposals that we'll be submitting this week for consideration.

I also want to highlight some of the events and messaging that we're doing to outreach into the community about safety.

City staff have attended several different events to promote safety education, including an Arlington Police Department drive safe event, UTA's Earth Day event in the spring, and a white cane safety walk in downtown Arlington with Arlington ISD students and teachers, as well as the mayor was able to join us, and he's here in that top picture.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments is also funding two roadway safety audits for some of our priority road segments.

One is Collins from Randall Mill to Brown Boulevard, and the other is Cooper from Arkansas to Division.

So City Staff is working with COG staff, TechSdot, and a consultant team to identify safety concerns on these roadway segments and recommend improvements.

And then finally, the Office of Communications is leading efforts to promote roadway safety through social media posts and news stories that come out regularly.