The City of Syracuse is working toward Vision Zero: eliminating all traffic fatalities and severe injuries while creating safe, healthy and equitable mobility.
The city is already doing some elements of Vision Zero like the municipal sidewalk program and automated enforcement speed, red light and bus stop arm cameras.
Syracuse Chief Operating Officer Corey Driscoll Dunham said the next steps for the initiative are taking a more holistic approach looking at high-injury locations and making proactive decisions in investments toward safety.
"When we are on those streets doing road reconstruction projects, do we look more proactively to say, 'We don't plan on doing and we don't have any planned road reconstruction on the street, but we know this is an issue and so we're proactively going to go out there and fix that access so that we can make it safer for vehicles and pedestrians,'" Driscoll Dunham said. "A lot of it is scale and some of it is going to be also just being more proactive and not necessarily based on projects that we already have planned."
Councilor Michael Greene said he was hoping to see Vision Zero further along since its announcement at Mayor Walsh's State of the City Address and cautioned that it would be a huge undertaking over several years.
"It's a huge communications push to the whole community to say, 'We're going to change the entire way we're doing transportation infrastructure,'" Greene said. "So I think that's just something to be able to have a road map before the end of the year to say like, 'This is this huge undertaking that we want to have live beyond this administration.'"
Driscoll Dunham acknowledged the timeline of the project.
"The plan is to have the vendor on board by the end of this year so that we can roll the plan out sometime next year," Driscoll Dunham said. "Keeping in mind that Vision Zero is an ongoing process. We'll never be done with road reconstruction. There will never be a time where we say, 'All the roads are paved, we're good,' and it's the same with Vision Zero."
Onondaga County received a $450,000 Safe Streets and Roads for All action plan grant from the United States Department of Transportation for developing a strategy to prevent roadway fatalities and serious injuries.
Driscoll Dunham said the City of Syracuse is working with the county to ensure both efforts are coordinated.
