Durango City Council demonstrated it is amicable to exploring a new way of thinking about safe road design last week when it approved a resolution committing the city to Vision Zero goals.
Vision Zero is a nest of emerging best practices that is gaining favor in the United States after being widely adopted in Europe and other countries, Lily Oswald, city multimodal manager, said on Tuesday.
The idea behind it is simple: It is possible to bring fatalities and serious injuries from crashes to zero, and that is achieved through stronger road designs, stronger education and stronger enforcement.
That is counter to the old approach to transportation planning, which worked on the assumption that fatalities and serious injuries are inherent to road systems and that’s just the way it is.
Just 82 communities in the United States have demonstrated a strong commitment to the Vision Zero philosophy, though they range in size from communities with similar population sizes to Durango’s to massive metropolises like New York City, Oswald said.
Just two communities have demonstrated their commitment to Vision Zero in Colorado – Boulder and Denver. But Durango may soon enough join the early ranks.
City Council’s resolution commits the city to five overarching goals Oswald reviewed Tuesday:
The resolution itself is nonbinding, she said. It doesn’t mandate staffing or budgets. But it lays out the city’s next steps to forming new policies aligned with Vision Zero and creating a community advisory group so the public is involved in plans, with a priority on safety and transportation planning.
New policies would apply to departments across the city, however, and Oswald said she anticipates that will change the city’s capital improvement priorities and change how the city approaches roadway development. If so, those changes would likely come with significant fiscal impacts.
The resolution contains six steps the city must take to realize a Vision Zero dream:
“This is so good, I could cry,” Councilor Shirley Gonzales, who made transportation a priority in her run for city office, said on Tuesday. “This is so good. It’s like all I could ever dream of.”
She said she worked on Vision Zero goals in New York in 2013, and she struggled to get buy-in from staff members. Durango already hits a lot of Vision Zero goals and that’s one of the reasons she decided to move there.
“I have vision impairments, I don’t drive that much. But when I do, I need to drive really slow,” she said. “We need to give people plenty of space and alternatives, especially for people that don’t drive.”
Councilor Gilda Yazzie had a different reaction, questioning how feasible the plan really is. She said she has no idea what the plan’s financial impact to the city would be.
“It doesn’t say what we’re going to do other than … put a little blue ribbon on all these things and pat ourselves on the back,” she said. “I don’t see any way that we can get any direct outcomes with this.”
Yazzie said the city can’t control roads that merge into Durango city limits and she’s more concerned about safety on the Animas River Trail, where in 2024 a cyclist fell off his bike and struck his head after colliding with a loose dog, later dying from his injuries.
Oswald said a Vision Zero approach is more systemic than reducing speed limits or increasing enforcement.
“It’s trying to layer all of these different tactics together to try to make serious deaths and fatalities eliminated on roadways,” she said.
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