Tag: MA Vision Zero Coalition

Great Day of Action for Road Safety on Beacon Hill

Great Day of Action for Road Safety on Beacon Hill

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Thank you so much to everyone who joined us at the Statehouse for the Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition’s Road Safety Day of Action! Thank you to Governor Baker & Lt. Governor Polito for also filing legislation focused on road safety and getting the conversation started.

A packed room heard from Governor Baker, Text Less Live More, Children’s Hospital, AAA, SADD, and co-sponsors of three important bills:

  1. The Hands-Free Bill(s)

    • Chairman Wagner & Representative Donato are sponsoring HD1534
    • Chairman Straus is sponsoring HD1420
    • Representative Provost is sponsoring HD1346
    • Senator Montigny is sponsoring SD1383
    • Senators Creem & Brownsberger are sponsoring SD897

  2. Automated Enforcement Bill

    • Senator William Brownsberger is sponsoring SD1461

  3. An Act to Reduce Traffic Fatalities

    • Senator William Brownsberger is sponsoring SD847
    • Representative Hecht and Representative Rogers are sponsoring HD1653
WalkBoston Executive Director Wendy Landman explains an aspect of the bill.

The morning was organized by the Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition (WalkBoston, Safe Roads Alliance, MassBike, LivableStreets Alliance, Boston Cyclists Union, Transportation for Massachusetts & more) & Text Less Live More. After info packets were distributed, people were off to meet with their legislators and talk about why these efforts would make MA roads safer in their own communities. Thank you to everyone who came together today to work towards safer streets, and thank you to all of the legislators and staff that attended and listened throughout the day!

Were you unable to make it to Beacon Hill, but want to get involved with WalkBoston’s efforts?

Join us on Jan 23rd for a Day of Action at the State House

Join us on Jan 23rd for a Day of Action at the State House

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Please join us and other members of the Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition for a Day of Action at the State House on the morning of Wednesday, January 23rd.

We’ll go door-to-door and ask our representatives and senators to support traffic safety legislation around three key issues. This legislation will save lives, reduce injuries, and bring us closer to Vision Zero. Read more about these issues below.

Event Details:
Day of Action at the State House
Wednesday, January 23, 2019, 9:30 am to 12:00 pm
@ Massachusetts State House, Room 437
24 Beacon Street, Boston

Schedule:
9:30 – 10:00 am | Arrive, check in, enjoy coffee + light breakfast
10:00 – 10:30 am | Program (speakers TBA)
10:30 am – 12 pm | Meetings with legislative offices

Training materials and talking points will be provided day of. Even if you can’t commit to the full morning, you are welcome to join us for any part of the schedule! Please RSVP here.

Priorities for Traffic Safety Legislation:

  1. Hands-free — improve the current law against texting-while-driving, which is difficult for officers to enforce, by requiring any use of mobile devices while driving to be hands-free.
  2. Automated enforcement — allow red light cameras and speed cameras to be placed in certain locations in the Commonwealth. When enacted in other states, automated enforcement has reduced speeding and serious crashes.
  3. Truck safety — equip state-contracted trucks with safety side-guards, mirrors, and back-up cameras to reduce the number of fatalities of people walking and biking.

Traffic fatalities are unacceptably high in Massachusetts, and we know that crashes are not accidents – they’re the tragic, preventable results of inadequate planning, policy, and unsafe behavior.

Help us spread the word about the Day of Action to your contacts by sharing this post, and via social media before and during the event using these hashtags: #crashnotaccident #visionzero #textlesslivemore

Please RSVP here. For more information, contact Emily Stein at emily@saferoadsalliance.org.

We hope to see you there!

MA Vision Zero Coalition Statement on Commonwealth Ave Fatal Crash

MA Vision Zero Coalition Statement on Commonwealth Ave Fatal Crash

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Statement from the Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition:

The Commonwealth Avenue crash that claimed the life of Theodore J. Schwalb, age 80, an arts teacher at Stoneham High School for more than 40 years, is disturbing on many levels. The driver, Phocian Fitts, acknowledges that he drove the car that struck and killed Mr. Schwalb in the middle of the day and then fled the scene. He stated this in an interview with Boston 25 News after he was released from police custody:

“People hit and run people all the time, it just happened to be an unfortunate situation where I was driving.”

Mr. Fitts’ comments, although brazen, reflect the low bar we’ve set when it comes to holding people accountable for reckless driving behavior.

  • A culture that accepts fatal crashes as a fact of life means law enforcement isn’t holding drivers accountable. We are deeply disturbed that the alleged suspect was initially questioned and released without charges despite fleeing the scene of a fatal crash. An arrest was only made after the Boston 25 News interview, in which he admitted to “driving too quick to the point where I couldn’t really stop” before running over and killing a fellow Boston resident.
  • A culture that accepts fatal crashes as a fact of life means lawmakers don’t realize the urgency of safety legislation. A hands free driving bill, which has passed the Senate and is backed by broad public support and Governor Baker, has languished in the House for years and now is awaiting action in the House Ways and Means Committee.
  • A culture that accepts fatal crashes as a fact of life means that thousands of people are seriously injured on Massachusetts streets every year.  In 2017, there were 4,537 injury crashes on Boston’s streets, which is up ten percent since 2015. Across Massachusetts, at least 133 people have been killed on our roads in the first 5 months of 2018.

While we are brokenhearted that another life has been lost on our streets, we are hopeful that the culture is beginning to shift around designing and building safer streets. In 2015 Mayor Walsh committed Boston to Vision Zero, an effort to eliminate serious and fatal crashes. Cambridge and Somerville soon followed suit.

Each of these cities have worked to make good on their Vision Zero commitments by redesigning dangerous corridors and intersections, and Boston recently announced a major investment in its Transportation Department’s safety efforts.

To ensure our streets are safe and accessible for everyone, design is important. We also need law enforcement and elected leaders to step up and make it clear that reckless driving deserves severe consequences.

Wendy Landman, Executive Director, WalkBoston
Emily Stein, President, Safe Roads Alliance
Stacy Thompson, Executive Director, LivableStreets Alliance
Becca Wolfson, Executive Director, Boston Cyclist Union

Additional Sources

  • A 2018 AAA study found that “Hit-and-run crashes in the United States are trending in the wrong direction,” according to Dr. David Yang, executive director of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. The report found that most victims of fatal hit-and-run crashes are pedestrians or bicyclists. Over the past 10 years, nearly 20 percent of all pedestrian deaths were caused by hit-and-run crashes, meanwhile just one percent of all driver fatalities in that same time period were hit-and-run crashes.
  • The Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition maintains a map of fatal crashes involving people biking or walking across Massachusetts.
  • WalkBoston tracks fatal pedestrian crashes across Massachusetts. This is compiled manually via news & social media alerts in order to give communities more information to help push for safer streets.
MA Vision Zero Coalition support for the Inman Square project

MA Vision Zero Coalition support for the Inman Square project

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May 21, 2018

To the Cambridge City Council,

We are writing to you today since we understand you will be conducting a hearing tonight that involves discussion on the removal of 4 or 5 trees from Inman Square, to facilitate the Inman Square road design for transportation safety.

The goals of the Inman Square redesign are to make the square, specifically the large intersection of Hampshire and Cambridge Streets, safer for people biking and walking — the most vulnerable road users. This is in line with the Cambridge Vision Zero policy, and is particularly timely as a  response to the dangers highlighted by the fatal crash that took the life of Amanda Phillips in June of 2016, while she was riding her bike away from Inman Square.

The Vision Zero Coalition is working to make Massachusetts safer for all road users and we believe that the proposed changes to Inman Square will make that complicated and busy intersection much safer for people walking and biking.  In addition, the plan responds to the requests of local residents and business owners to create a more attractive and connected Vellucci Plaza to better serve businesses. We believe that the plan now makes the most of the opportunity for a large re-construction project, to fix the traffic and safety operations of Inman Square, and provide an opportunity to revitalize struggling businesses in the Square.

We sincerely hope that the objections to the project stemming from the loss of 4-5 trees (which will be transplanted and/or replaced) will not delay these important safety improvements any longer.

Trees are an extremely important part of the  urban fabric and contribute to pedestrian comfort and safety, and our organizations advocate for trees as an important element of streetscape design. Trees are also important contributors to environmental benefits. As transportation is the number one contributor to greenhouse gases in Massachusetts, it is imperative that we provide people with transportation options that get them out of single occupancy vehicles. The amount of carbon that a tree can sequester is moot if we can get hundreds, even thousands, more people out of cars and onto their feet, transit and bicycles. While  Cambridge boasts one of

the highest percentages of people who travel by walking, transit and biking, that percentage could be much higher if the City is safer and more attractive for people using those modes.

While we regret the loss of four to five trees, making progress on safety,  mode shift, and the continued vitality of Inman Square outweighs that loss and we believe the project should move forward as soon as possible.  We are pleased that the designers and City staff have found a way to plant even more trees than are being removed.

We look forward to seeing the re-construction of Inman Square get underway, and to the safer, more convenient and more vibrant Square that will result.

Best regards,

Wendy Landman, WalkBoston

Stacy Thompson, LivableStreets Alliance

Becca Wolfson, Boston Cyclists Union

Members and leaders of the Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition

Vision Zero Coalition Letter to Mayor Walsh 11/21/16

Vision Zero Coalition Letter to Mayor Walsh 11/21/16

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November 21, 2016

Dear Mayor Walsh,

On behalf of the Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition we would like to thank you for meeting with us to discuss how we can work together to advance progress toward the City’s Vision Zero goals.

We look forward to working with you on the ideas you shared at the meeting including:

  • Supporting the addition of crashes to your dashboard. We believe that the dashboard should show separate statistics by mode (walking, biking, vehicle, other) and should include both injuries and fatalities. We also think that this crash count should include crashes on state roads that have occurred in Boston -­‐-­the public is blind to this nuance and this is how the federal data is recorded. We’ve recommended this to your staff and are happy to follow up with them.
  • An education campaign, and we would like to take you up on your offer to participate in a PSA pertaining to Vision Zero. We are also glad that City staff are working with MassDOT to find ways to collaborate on State and City safety education campaigns.
  • Doing walking assessments to further explore and experience some of the specific signal issue we discuss. We chatted with BTD staff after the meeting and they offered to go on a walk with us first. We look forward to going on a walking tour with you in the coming months as well.

We would also like to reiterate the requests we made of you in the meeting:

  1.  That you will personally commit to ensuring that every department involved in Vision Zero feels the same obligation to bring the number of fatal crashes on our streets to zero, and that all departments are working from the same play book (i.e. the Vision Zero Action Plan; GoBoston 2030) to achieve this goal.
  2. That you will provide additional resources to BTD for Vision Zero in 2017. One way to do this is to charge for parking permits (as is done in surrounding communities: Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville). For example, $30/permit could create 3 million dollars in new revenue in 2017.
  3. That you will work with your staff to create more ambitious Vision Zero goals for 2017 -­‐ 2020 that include:
    a) Completing all of the goals in the 2016 Action Plan by June 2017
    b) Bringing neighborhood slow streets to every residential neighborhood in Boston by 2018 (which the staff have indicated would require additional staff and capital resources).
    c) Working toward a city-­wide network of separated bike lanes on all major arterials in the next 10 years and a commitment to 10 miles of separated or low stress bike facilities each year.
    d) Fixing all of Boston’s traffic signals by 2020, which we understand will require a substantial capital investment by the City (and which we understand to be a very ambitious goal). This would include automatic recall of WALK signals (unless a lightly used, mid-­‐block location), Leading Pedestrian Intervals (LPI) with a minimum 7 sec. interval, concurrent signals in all locations where safe (with documentation where concurrent should not be used), maximized WALK time at every intersection (no “reservation” of Don’t WALK time for vehicle throughput), re-­‐balancing of signal phasing to serve large volumes of pedestrians (e.g. Park/Tremont), addition of bicycle signals in all locations that include separated bike lane.

 

We fully recognize that these are not simple or easy asks, so we would like to reiterate our offer to work with your staff to better understand the challenges you are facing, so we can work together to find solutions that can be more quickly implemented. We believe that there is enormous community support for these actions, and that they will result in significant quality of life improvements across the City.

We are more than willing to:

  • Provide training for City staff
  • Suggest national experts who have helped other cities manage change
  • Meet with your leadership team to identify specific issues needing the most attention
  • Work with the City Council on these questions as well

We would also like to request a follow up meeting with you in June of 2017 to check in on our progress.

As we mentioned, the MA Vision Zero Coalition will be releasing a progress report on December 7th to report on the City’s progress toward the goals set forth in the Vision Zero Action plan.

We have already met with BTD staff to discuss the progress report in more detail and to determine the best way we can work together to both celebrate the progress made, while acknowledging the urgency of this issue and need to set more ambitious goals in 2017. We appreciate their cooperation and willingness to work with us to share information that will help the public see how Vision Zero is advancing in Boston.

Thank you again for your personal commitment to Vision Zero and your willingness to work with us on this critical issue.

For the Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition -­
Becca Wolfson, Boston Cyclists Union Doug Johnson, Boston Cyclists Union
David Read, Dana Farber
Stacy Thompson, LivableStreets Alliance
Brendan Kearney, WalkBoston
Wendy Landman, WalkBoston
Matt Lawlor, WalkUp Rozzie, Walk Boston

Cc Chris Osgood
Gina Fiandaca
Mike Dennehey
Mike Brohel
Vineet Gupta
Charlotte Fleetwood
Kris Carter