🚨 ALERT: Tell council to pass the Emergency Safe-Speed Resolution

[Matt Catanzarite]

Hello I am sharing the summary of recent efforts by our Partners in Advocacy to course correct the City of Ann Arbor's Vision Zero strategies.

- Matt

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and is staying cozy in this winter weather.

Thank you to all who have been contacting your councilmembers about the ongoing road-safety crisis, pressing them to ensure that City consultants follow the Vision Zero policies adopted by Council and that staff delivers the “quick-build” fixes promised for our known dangerous roads.

Unfortunately, the need for advocacy has only become more urgent. Not only has City Council failed to correct the consultant’s missteps or announce a major-road quick-build project, but:

• Last week, transportation staff publicly disavowed much of their responsibility for preventing road injuries.This is completely unacceptable and demands decisive action from every councilmember — now.

• We learned of a staff proposal to spend the $500k allocated for major-road quick-build safety improvements on a bike-lane extension on Catherine Street. While that’s a worthwhile project in its own right, it is not what we — and our allies on Council — fought for back in May: meaningful safety improvements on one or more high-injury major streets.

An ad-hoc group compiled these concerns into a resolution (attached) that in our view would help City Council immediately get back on track. (City Council, as a body, sets all of the goals and priorities of City staff by directing the head of City staff, Administrator Milton Dohoney.) Even in the current best-case scenario going forward — if Council acts at once — we will still see years of preventable injuries on our streets. But we will also begin sparing many lives. 

Speed kills, plain and simple. Road design dictates car speed. This is why this resolution focuses on safe speeds where conflicts occur. Without mandating this, City Council is missing the entire point of Vision Zero.

Slide from the September Transportation Commission meeting showing that literally nobody is driving a safe speed in the event of a crash.

I'll put more detail below, but first, here are the asks:

Go to the City Council meeting Monday night

• Monday, December 1, 6:30 pizza, 7pm City Council meeting
• City Hall
• Sign up for public comment if you are able, or just come and show support in person. There's no need to have gone to the Sunday meeting.

Read below and the attached resolution and email your councilmembers (cc: cityc...@a2gov.org)

• Let them know how the road safety crisis affects you and your loved ones, your feelings about the current situation, and why it's important to you to support the emergency Resolution to Require Safe-Speed Designs on all road projects. If you have questions, or would like to discuss anything on the growing list of issues, please contact me.

BACKGROUND

1. Here is an excellent Bluesky thread by Adam Goodman that summarizes many of the issues. It outlines why it's so dangerous to have staff clinging to a debunked, US-based philosophy that identifies "human behavior" — instead of environment — as the central culprit in crashes. This is the precise notion responsible for American roads being 3-7x more dangerous than our peers. It has no place in a community that has committed to eliminating serious injuries on their roads. This poses a difficult situation for City Council and the City Administrator, but it is a life-and-death issue that must be dealt with. 

This is the start of the thread:

2. Here is the letter that accompanied the attached resolution that was sent to City Council today. 

Dear Council:

The City’s transportation safety commitment is being undermined by a troubling misunderstanding of Vision Zero by City staff and hired consultants. This must be corrected immediately, and we hope that the attached resolution corrects course. Users of the transportation system are all humans, who are fallible and make mistakes and bad decisions. Transportation facilities and infrastructure influence human behavior through design. We therefore have the ability to engineer our transportation system in a way that encourages good behavior, prevents bad behavior, reduces mistakes, and minimizes injury and death when mistakes inevitably happen.  These core principles of Vision Zero empower us to improve safety for all users.

But despite a decades-long commitment to these Vision Zero principles, and plenty of evidence from our own streets, Transportation Engineering staff appear to have given up responsibility for keeping people safe in Ann Arbor (most recently, in their 11/17 crash-reporting presentation to the Transportation Commission: https://youtu.be/PLdne7vIK9g?t=6051). Road design can influence the behavior of “extreme, reckless, or impaired” drivers. The South Main reconfiguration in 2021 saw a 77% improvement in drivers following the speed limit and a 7X reduction in excessive speeding (>10mph over the posted speed limit). 

Transportation planners and engineers play a critical role in designing safer and more lively streets. In the 1960s, city staff changed Main St. from a four-lane road focused on moving cars to a 3-lane street with wide sidewalks, transforming a downtown space we now love to use and visit. Can you imagine a reactivated Stadium Boulevard, designed for walkability, local businesses, safety, and family life, rather than as an urban highway? It was widened in front of Pioneer High School in the 1950s; we need to continue recognizing our mistakes and urgently correcting them. 

There’s a lot of work to do; let’s re-align on the basic premise of Vision Zero and make our streets safe for all. 

Thank you,

Adam Goodman, Pete Houk, Mark Scerbo, and Kirk Westphal

3. Please also read the resolution, attached.

-=-=-=-=-=

Thank you again for all you do for our community, and again, I welcome you to reach out to me with thoughts and questions!

Best,

Kirk

PS: Neighborhood Institute runs on your generosity! If you are in a position to donate, you will help us keep bringing the housing affordability and transportation safety fight to Ann Arbor and beyond.

--