Quick Take
The Santa Cruz City Council adopted the city’s Road Safety Action Plan at its Tuesday meeting, setting some milestones over the next several decades and planning next steps to pursue with other agencies as it extended its goal of eliminating deaths on the road to 2050 instead of 2030.
Santa Cruz is moving forward with a plan to make city roads safer, with the city council unanimously adopting the city’s Road Safety Action Plan at its Tuesday meeting.
The plan includes a new target year of 2050 for eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries, replacing the city’s original 2030 goal.
The plan outlines long- and short-term recommendations for policies, programs and strategies to reduce casualties on city roads, which remains a significant problem. City transportation planner Amelia Conlen said in a presentation to the council that between 2020 and 2024, there were 626 total crashes in the city. Of those, 94 ended in serious injury and 16 people were killed. Additionally, she said about two-thirds of fatal and serious injury crashes involve a pedestrian or cyclist and 10% of crashes within the city occurred on Mission Street.
The city had previously adopted a “Vision Zero” resolution in 2019, which committed to eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries on city roads by 2030. But Conlen said the city is now setting 2050 as the target year. She said she recognizes that is a long way away, and that staff had received numerous messages from members of the public who believe it’s too far into the future.
In response, staff added an interim goal to reduce crashes on city roadways by 30% by 2030.
“It’s a really delicate balance to set a goal that is achievable. It takes many years for us to plan, fund and construct our projects, but we also want to set a goal that provides urgency and really motivates action,” Conlen said, adding that staff chose 2050 to account for the time it takes to implement projects and that the state has also adopted the same year as its goal for Vision Zero. “So, there’s some nice synergy there.”
Conlen laid out a number of staff recommendations for the council to consider. Those included lowering speed limits to 25 mph on streets that currently have 30 mph limits, and reducing speed limits in school zones to 15 mph; applying for grant funding for various safety projects such as bike-lane improvements on La Fonda Avenue, intersection improvements on Broadway and Seabright Avenue, and corridor improvements on Soquel Avenue.
Conlen also mentioned a recommendation for using existing grant funding for rest-in-red and leading pedestrian interval signal timing at intersections on Laurel and Ocean streets. Those give drivers red lights late at night and early in the morning and give pedestrians and bikers a head start, respectively, which help reduce speed- and alcohol-related collisions.
Staff also recommended establishing a staff working group to review serious injury locations, write a letter to state agency Caltrans requesting safety improvements on state-owned roadways, like Mission Street, and develop a scope and budget for pilot projects conducive to both traffic calming and maintaining access for fire vehicles to keep response times strong.
Councilmember Renee Golder eventually offered a motion to adopt the plan and approve the recommendations with a few additions, such as reducing speeds on West Cliff Drive and mentioning the intersection of Bay Street and Mission Street, as well as the shoulders between Western Drive and Swift Street and Mission Street and High Street.
Councilmember Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson offered a friendly amendment to prioritize streets designated as emergency response routes, where requests for traffic calming align with staff data, and to consider distributing improvements across the five city council districts.
Councilmember Susie O’Hara offered another friendly amendment to target a 65% reduction in serious injury or fatal crashes by 2040 in addition to the other milestones. The motion passed unanimously.
Public commenters were by and large supportive of the plan, with many saying they believe that it provides a strong path forward for tangible improvements to safety on city streets. However, some were disappointed with the longer-term outlook for the Vision Zero commitment and expressed unease with data that shows serious and fatal accidents continuing to increase over the years, even if slowly.
“I think there’s many possibilities about why it might be the case, but it’s possible that some of the projects we’ve done haven’t been helpful,” said City Transportation and Public Works Commissioner Ron Goodman, who said he was speaking as a member of the public. “Since we have very finite money, determining this is pretty critical to ensuring that we’re spending that limited money optimally.”
Resident Kevin Norton said he was concerned with the 2050 target date and what he called a lack of transparency regarding the plan. He asked why the city’s Vision Zero task force stopped operating, and said that he’s asked Councilmember Scott Newsome where a June allocation of $500,000 for road safety has gone, with no answer yet. Norton advocated for delaying adoption of the plan and for the creation of a public-facing task force.
“We shouldn’t delay safety improvements, but we also shouldn’t quietly abandon our 2030 commitment without a full public discussion,” he said. “If Vision Zero means saving lives, shouldn’t the public have a say before we push that promise back 20 years?”
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