It is likely that council member Caity Maple, along with Mayor Darryl Steinberg and council member Karina Talamantes, will introduce an emergency declaration on traffic safety at the city council meeting tonight, starting at 5:00 PM. The item is not on the agenda, so I presume it will be introduced during the ‘Council Comments-Ideas, Questions’ part of the agenda, after all the numbered agenda items. Council members get their ‘matters not on the agenda’ time, just like the public does. None of the advocates I have asked have a clear picture of how emergency declarations work. I presume the idea will come back to council one to many times in the near future, but tonight is your first chance to hear what the council has to say and comment on the ideas.

Caity Maple has posted about the recent injury (now fatality) and the emergency response she wants the city to take:

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I’m devastated to see yet another person critically injured after being struck by a vehicle on Sacramento’s roads. Even beyond our City’s commitments to eliminate traffic deaths through Vision Zero, we need to take immediate and urgent action. This coming Tuesday, alongside my colleagues Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Mayor Pro Tem Karina Talamantes, I will be introducing a proposal that:

• Declares a state of emergency for the City of Sacramento regarding the road safety crisis
• Directs the City Manager to identify funding for a public education campaign focused on driver education, pedestrian/ bicyclist awareness, and traffic safety
• Directs the City Manager to work with SacPD to ramp up enforcement of traffic laws that protect pedestrians, including speed limit enforcement, crosswalk violations, and distracted driving, especially in high-injury corridors
• Reaffirms our commitment to Vision Zero and directs staff to expedite safety projects

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Several transportation advocacy organizations, including Civic Thread, Slow Down Sacramento, Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates (SABA), and Strong SacTown have made public or in development comments about the proposal. If you are not a member or supporter or at least on the email list for these organizations, I encourage you to do so.

I encourage you to read and follow Ariane Lange of the SacBee for great articles and insight into the issues of traffic violence and the real stories of those killed and injured. An article today, Sacramento may declare a state of emergency over dangerous roads. Could it save lives? provides an overview of the problem, the solutions, and the concerns of transportation advocates.

I’ll comment briefly on each of the four solutions raised in Caity Maple’s post.

Emergency: You bet its an emergency. But it is really a public health crisis, when government allows people to die and be severely injured on our streets, without taking any meaningful action to protect people. Road safety is not the right term, traffic violence is.

Education: Education is not a real solution. Despite the preference for government to address issues with ‘education’, there is almost no research to indicate that education of the public has any real effect on either driver behavior or safety outcomes. California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) love ‘education’ because it absolves them of taking action. Neither agency has been able to produce data supporting the expenditure of funds on these programs. Drivers know when they are violating the law. They decide to violate the law because road (mis)design encourages them to, and they know there are rarely consequences for doing so.

Enforcement: I am one among the crowd of transportation advocates who do not see law enforcement as contributing to safety on our streets. Police have used traffic law to oppress people of color and low income. Always have, and I believe, always will. It is in their nature. The SacBee article mentions that police blame pedestrians (people walking) for most crashes. This is a known bias in crash reporting, that the police routinely absolve drivers and blame walkers, made easy by the fact the walkers are often dead and cannot tell their side of the story. The recent police crosswalk enforcement action actually highlights the problem with law enforcement. They used overtime pay from OTS to carry out this program. The rest of the year? Nothing. Police do not enforce driver failure to yield to walkers unless they get extra money for it. They really do not care about the safety of people outside cars, except as an afterthought. The one effective and, if properly implemented, equitable solution to traffic violations is automated enforcement, but this is not mentioned in the list, and the city (police and staff) is pretty uniformly opposed to it.

Vision Zero: VZ in Sacramento has been a failure. We don’t need to recommit, we need to rethink. The focus on corridors and refusal to address intersections in the VZ Action Plan mean that unsafe intersections are not addressed except if they are along a corridor.

Lastly, the recommendation does not mention increased funding for quick build solutions at high crash locations. The city has long been committed to a policy that it does not spend any general funds on street safety, except for the minimum necessary for grant matches. It is the only government entity in this region that has that regressive viewpoint. We need to be allocating a significant about of general fund to immediate actions. Not some long term plan that might make our streets safety 20 years, 50 years, a 100 years from now. City Manager Howard Chan is the current champion of this ‘no money for street safety’ policy. The Sacramento Active Transportation Commission recommended that the city put $10M into street safety, and most council members supported that, but Howard Chan said no. And since Howard Chan runs this city, the final answer in this year’s budget was no. It is time for the council to fire Chan.

I appreciate Caity Maple, Mayor Steinberg, and Karina Talmantes raising the profile of this issue. Council (not to mention staff) has been almost silent on this issue since budget adoption. It needs to be talked about, and talked about at every council meeting, and acted on, and reported on to the citizens who being threatened by our (mis)designed streets.