City Council held a work session on the Safe Streets for All comprehensive safety action plan on March 17, 2026, to evaluate priorities for reducing traffic fatalities and serious injuries. Mayor Pro Tem Harrison was absent and excused. Sean Driscoll, Vision Zero Program Manager, presented the plan’s findings, recommendations, and next steps, followed by council discussion.
All right, everybody, welcome to the work session on safe streets for all. Uh Mayor Pro Tem Harrison is absent and excused, and we will proceed with the session. Good morning. Sean Driscoll from Transportation. Yes, ma'am. Good morning, Madam Mayor, City Council. My name is Sean Driscoll. I'm the Vision Zero Program Manager here at the city. So I'm gonna start off by kind of highlighting what's in front of you. So what you have there is the executive summary from the comprehensive safety action plan. A list of all the high injury network and high injury intersections that fall within your respective district. The mayor and the outlarges have all maps. And then again, the list. So getting into the presentation, I you know, it's safe to say that everyone in this room probably individually or knows someone that's been affected by a traffic crash. And that's the goal here today, and that's what this study uh is here to do is to evaluate where our priorities are and try to reduce and eliminate serious injuries and fatalities. So the agenda I'm gonna touch on uh the background, the vision zero program, some of the accomplishments that we've completed over the last four years or so. Get into the action plan and the development of it, highlight the safety networks, that's the high injury network and high risk network. I'll speak to more. The engagement that we completed and the findings and the recommendations from the citizens, and then the plan recommendations and and on to next steps. So in the city, we have about 20 to 25,000 reported crashes every year. Of those, around 250 are serious injury or life altering crashes, and about 40 or so are our fatalities. So that 290 are the crashes we're focusing on, trying to eliminate and and trying to reduce and eventually eliminate. Mary's has has gone over very well, it's very well received and has a big impact. And then constructing signals at Riverbend Elementary as well as Wakefield, where those have been advertised, and we'll start construction this summer. So other improvements we're making around intersections, you've heard us talk about this a lot, but leading pedestrian intervals, accessible pedestrian signals, high visibility crosswalks, and then lots of streetlight improvements across the city, trying to focus on areas where we're having serious injuries and fatalities. So the needs are overwhelming across the city, and so how do we prioritize that? So developing this plan will go a long way in doing so. So a few years back, the city pursued a safe streets and road for all grant, which we were awarded $1 million to develop this plan. And uh adoption of this plan is required for uh pursuing implementation funding here in the future. And y'all feel free to stop me at any point in the uh presentation to ask questions. So getting into the plan. It was built on crash data and stakeholder input. So the crash data is the high injury network, I'll touch on the roadway risk analysis is the high risk network. So that's our high injury networks are reactive approach, and our high risk network is our proactive approach. So lots of public and stakeholder engagement. We developed a vision zero task force with the members that you see here. It's kind of acted as our steering committee as we've navigated the development of this plan over the last two years. Some of the big findings I just want to call out. Achieving vision zero is more than just building infrastructure. There are a lot of behavioral based challenges that we have. And of all the fatal and serious injury crashes for the 10 year data set we pulled from 2013 and 2023, more than half involve speeding, and almost 75% involved no seat belt. Okay, so this is the high injury network. This is our reactive approach. So what you're looking at here is a number of corridors and intersections that have had the most serious injuries and fatalities within the city. The orange is the top 20 corridors, and the red dots are high injury intersections. So again, contributing factors are speeding behavior and lane departure. Um approximately 50% of all fatal and serious injury crashes are resulting on roadways, which the speed is greater than 40 miles per hour. And this high injury network you're looking at, about 80% of it falls on NC DOT owned roadways. So again, not placing blame on them, but just driving home the need for our great partnership and continued partnership we have to make improvements along those corridors. Next is a high risk network.