The March 25, 2025 City Council workshop focused on two traffic safety items: the Vision Zero Safety Action Plan (presented by Public Works and consultants) and a discussion on automated speed safety cameras (AVIS) led by the Police Department. The meeting also included a new ideas segment where council discussed regional minimum wage coordination. No formal votes were taken; direction was provided for staff to continue developing the Vision Zero plan and to monitor AVIS developments, with emphasis on potential collaboration with Boulder County on US 287.
All right. Well, welcome in, ladies and gentlemen. Um get started. Um I will open up the March twenty-fifth, twenty twenty-five City Council workshop. We have a couple items regarding traffic and safety, uh, beginning with our uh vision zero safety action plan, uh, followed up by our a speed safety cameras discussion with our police department here. And then we'll conclude with any new ideas that council members may want to bring up regarding various topics. Um, so we'll go ahead and get started then with our first item on the agenda. Vision Zero Safety Action Plan. And we have our public works director, Jeff Arthur here. I don't know if you agree to start it over to Michelle Malanakis, our transportation engineer. Awesome. Thank you, Mayor and members of council. We're here tonight to talk about the safety action plan or the vision zero action plan. I'm here with Jeff Arthur, Director of Public Works, Leslie Huey, the engineering CIP and Division Manager. Jessica Hernandez, a transportation planner with console engineers, and Ray Stefani, a transportation safety engineer with Y2K. We have a fairly long agenda for this evening. We'll do a brief introduction, a review of the crash analysis that you've already seen, a high risk network development process, our strategy and actions that we've developed, our most recent community feedback and our proposed prioritization methodology, and then ongoing and upcoming efforts. A couple ways in which staff were approaching safety improvement. Lafayette PD has a crash report tracking that they do. Engineering and PD were working together on some high collision locations and proposed improvements. And then staff have been working with Dr. Cog and other regions, other regional partners on the Dr. Cog Vision Zero plan. South Boulder Road, US 287, and C07. So along with our MMTP development, the corridors that the community was really interested in 287 was number one. C07 west of 287 was number two. South Boulder Road was number three or four. So we had started prioritizing those with the MMTP. We went after a preliminary study on South Boulder Road with Dr. Cog that was approved and finalized last year. And then we've had ongoing coordination through a couple roadway coalitions. Primarily State Highway 7 has been running for several years now, and US 287 just started last year. But it's a these coalitions are have quarterly meetings where everyone gets together and works on advocating for funding from the feds in the state and trying to progress projects to improve safety along those roadways. But overall, we as part of the MMT development, we which was in the implementation plan. We wanted a plan that would focus more on Lafayette roadways and things that we could do with both ongoing efforts and projects to improve safety more locally as well. So today we're in the project prioritization, the purple phase. Since then we've been working on strategy identifications and the project prioritization methodology. We had phase two, which just closed on the 14th, that we'll be reviewing tonight. And then we'll be moving forward to draft the draft action plan after this. As a reminder of what the vision zero and safety safe systems approach are the goal is to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injury crashes. The safe systems approach aims to prevent deaths and serious injuries by acknowledging human error, designing for vulnerability, and sharing responsibility among all stakeholders, including road users, engineers, policymakers. It's a five-pronged approach. So we want to encourage safe and responsible driving behavior by people who use the roads, designing roadway environments to mitigate human mistakes and facilitate safe travel by the most vulnerable road users. Expand the availability of vehicle systems and features that help prevent and minimize impacts of crashes. Promote safer speeds in all roadway environments through a combination of context-sensitive roadway design, appropriate speed limit setting, education, outreach, and enforcement, and then enhance the survivability of crashes through expedient access to emergency medical care while creating a safe working environment for vital first responders and preventing secondary crashes through incident management. And then together, all of these layers help to design for redundancy so that one of the layers in place fails, the others are in place to help. A death or serious injury will only happen when all of the layers fail. And then I will pass it off to Ray for a review on the crash analysis. Great. Thank you, Mayor and Council.