NVTA Seeks Feedback from Community on “Vision Zero” Effort to Eliminate Traffic Deaths and Severe Injuries

The public is invited to take a traffic safety survey and add map-based feedback on areas of concern in Napa Valley.

Napa, Calif. – Do you feel safe walking, biking, or driving in Napa County? Would you be willing to reduce your driving speed to improve road safety for yourself and other road users? Have you been in a road collision or near-miss? These are some of the questions the Napa Valley Transportation Authority is asking the community to provide feedback on as it develops a countywide “Vision Zero” safety plan to eliminate severe and fatal traffic collisions.

Between 2015-2021, there were 4,908 injuries in Napa County traffic collisions. Of those, 608 were severe or fatal. This is part of a larger national statistic: every year, more than 42,000 people are killed on American streets, and many more are severely injured. NVTA is joining a national effort to reverse this trend and improve road safety throughout Napa County for all users. Through a community survey and open-source comment map, NVTA staff seeks to learn about driver, pedestrian, and cyclist behavior and perceptions about local road safety to develop a successful Vision Zero plan.

NVTA Vision Zero Survey
NVTA asks that anyone living or working in Napa County take part in the Vision Zero survey, available online: http://bit.ly/VisionZeroSurvey. The survey will be available until Friday, June 16, 2023 and is available in English and Spanish by toggling for your preferred language.

NVTA Vision Zero Map
Additionally, people can highlight their areas of traffic safety concern, such as speeding, rolling through stops signs, poor street lighting or visibility at intersections, etc., on an interactive map, available here: https://streetstory.berkeley.edu/county/NAPA.

The Napa County Vision Zero plan includes:

• community engagement,
• systematic and data-driven analysis,
• strategies for engineering, education, and enforcement,
• evaluation and implementation strategy development, and
• project prioritization or location-specific engineering recommendations for areas with the most severe and fatal injury crash rates.

“Too many family members, friends and colleagues have been lost or severely injured due to traffic collisions on our roads, and we should not accept this as inevitable,” said NVTA Principal Planner Diana Meehan. “We can create safer roads for everyone, but it’s going to take a broad and inclusive community effort across multiple sectors to be successful. Participation from the community will help us understand people’s willingness to change their behavior or to accept trade-offs that improve safety like slower speeds or less parking to implement protected bike lanes or roundabouts at intersections. The only acceptable number for severe and fatal collisions on our roadways is zero.”

About Vision Zero

Vision Zero is a road system safety strategy that seeks to eliminate fatal and severe collisions using the “Safe Systems Approach.” This approach involves a paradigm shift to improve safety culture, increase collaboration across safety stakeholders, and refocus transportation design and operation by anticipating human mistakes and lessening the impact forces to reduce crash severity and save lives.

To learn more about NVTA’s Vision Zero plan and the Safe Systems Approach, visit NVTA’s Vision Zero webpage.

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