Great.

Good evening, everybody.

Thank you for joining us this evening.

Today is May 14th.

It is 5 p.m.

We are here in Council Chambers.

Welcome to the Parks and Built Environment Council Committee meeting tonight.

Tonight we have two agenda items, some uh lengthy briefings from staff, in-depth briefings for some ongoing work that we're doing here at the city.

And I think I'm excited for very informative evening.

Uh so first on our agenda, we have a vision zero update briefing from staff.

And I uh see a few staff folks here.

So uh if you could introduce yourself real quick and uh share your title for the record and uh kick off the briefing, that'd be great.

Great thing.

Great, thank you, uh, Councilmember Ryan.

Um, thanks for the opportunity to come uh brief you on where we're at with Vision Zero, our comprehensive safety action plan to eliminate serious injuries and fatal crashes in Everett.

Uh, I'm Corey Hertz, City Traffic Engineer.

And with me today is I'm Stephen Pickenshire.

I'm the chair for the traffic advisory committee.

Yeah.

All right.

Do we have a slide presentation?

Okay.

Thank you.

So I guess I can get started while she's bringing up the slides.

Um, as we uh probably heard uh back in 2023, Everett was awarded a 788,000 Safe Streets for All grant to create a comprehensive safety action plan, our vision zero plan for Everett.

Um Vision Zero is this is a safety action plan uh with comprehensive data-driven approach to effectively evaluate and list proven strategies and uh for projects uh for adoption of the city and future planning and outcomes.

Robust data collection and analysis of the city's roadway has been conducted and a plan developed uh with high risk network to propose safety improvements, mitigation strategies, and design concepts with corridor project recommendations.

Final documents will present an actionable plan to improve safety for all rate roadway users and significantly reduce and eliminate uh roadway fatalities and serious injuries.

Next slide, please.

And next slide, please.

Thank you.

So crashes in Everett have been following uh general Washington state trends.

While overall crashes have been uh following, the severity has been increasing.

Um for the past five years of available data, there were 9,730 crashes overall on Everett streets that were reported.

These crashes don't include our limited access highways like I-5, Highway 526, and Highway 529 north of the Snow Mish River.

So during that time, there were 54 fatal crashes and 215 serious injury crashes.

And while these numbers are much smaller, each severe uh severe crash has a huge impact on those injured and their families.

So while uh overall the crashes in the state have been trending down, the most severe crashes in the state of Washington are at 30 year highs.

So Everett is not alone.

So here are the most uh common types of severe crashes in Everett over the past five years.

There are pedestrians at 31%, uh, angle or T-bone style crashes at 16%, uh left turn crashes at 13%, uh, and barrier and fixed object crashes at 8%.

You'll notice these numbers don't add up to 100%.

That's because there's other types of crashes like bicyclists involved and side swipe, um, hitting park cars and things like that.

But pretty clearly pedestrians, uh pedestrian crash issue in Everett that we have needs to be solved.

So the trend of serious pedestrian crashes follows the overall trend.

And when looking at fatal crashes alone, pedestrian crashes make up about 50% of all overall fatal crashes in Everett.

When the crash locations are geocoded uh on a map, like the one to the right, uh, it shows that most crashes happen on or near major uh arterial streets like Evergreen Way, Everett Mallway, and Broadway.

So the zero death vision acknowledges that one death in our transportation system is unacceptable and focuses on safety and mobility for all users.

The wheel you see on the right is a graphical representation of the safe systems approach.

The underlying principle is that um to achieve our zero death vision, everyone must accept that fatalities and serious injuries are unacceptable and preventable.

The plan that's being developed has been developed by collecting data and performing a detailed safety analysis, seeking public input as the plan is developed, and then developing appropriate strategies for countermeasures.

These do not occur sequentially.

Public engagement has been occurring throughout the plan's development.

In fact, I'll be at Westmont Holly this weekend providing that neighborhood on an update.

The safety analysis started by analyzing five years of data from 2019 to 2023 and developing a high-risk network, which includes a synthesis of three networks, a high injury network that maps 50% of the serious injuries and fatal crashes on city streets, a high crash network that represents 50% of all the overall crashes on city streets.

And last, it maps crash segments at locations where the critical crash rate is higher than a similar streets in Everett.

This is done to make sure we include locations that while might not be on the highest crash level overall, it's a higher crash rate than we might expect.

So from that, we've created a high-risk network.

And it was reviewed as a network including corridors and spot locations, where we established our priority corridors where we needed to put our efforts in additional uh evaluation.

Um these corridors will also have uh many intersections, mostly signalized, representing the highest crashes in the city, like Evergreen Way and Airport, Evergreen and 112th, uh, Evergreen and Casino Road and Broadway and 16th Street, as well as others.