Tulsa City Councilor Blake Ewing is asking his colleagues for a formal commitment to the idea no number of traffic deaths or serious injuries is acceptable.
Ewing wants them to pass a resolution of support for the concepts of Vision Zero, the global safety movement behind that. Doing so would not commit the city to any particular projects.
"It is not a policy action. It is simply stating our representative will of the public and communicating it clearly to the people that make other policies inside this building," Ewing said.
The commitment to Vision Zero would ensure current and future city engineers think about things like pedestrian interactions with traffic when they design roads. There are a number of considerations to make when people jaywalk, for example.
"Was the crosswalk accessible? Was it well-lit? Was it easy to operate? Were the cars following the rules at that crosswalk? Do we need another crosswalk mid-block? Are we asking people to walk an unreasonable distance to get to a safe crossing?" Ewing said. "Those are the kinds of things that I think we want to ask our engineers, the people that design our roads in Tulsa, to contemplate."
The city council adopted a similar set of ideas earlier this decade that has made its mark on Tulsa.
"That Complete Streets, if you’ll recall, directed that when we do road construction work that we do an accompanying sidewalk or that we contemplate other uses for the road beyond just the automobile, and it has changed the way that we build infrastructure in the City of Tulsa," Ewing said.
Councilors discussed the Vision Zero resolution in a committee meeting this week but took no action on it, asking for time to take a closer look at the strategies Vision Zero endorses.
More than a dozen U.S. cities or states have adopted goals of the Vision Zero movement, which originated in Sweden in 1997.
