The City and County of Honolulu has released a plan to cut traffic fatalities and serious injuries to "zero" by 2040.
The O‘ahu Vision Zero Action Plan includes various steps to get the city to reach its goal. They fall under five categories focusing on streets, people, vehicles and vehicle speeds, post-crash care, and include both infrastructure upgrades and policy changes.
It was reported that from 2015 to 2020, there was an average of 280 traffic incidents per year on Oʻahu that resulted in death or serious injury.
The plan supports reducing the speed limit on major streets to 25 mph, and in neighborhoods and school zones to 20 mph. It also suggests funding a “crosswalk upgrade program” for quick improvements including raised crosswalks, pedestrian crossing islands and speed humps.
Other actions also include higher speeding fines, lighting improvements at high-injury locations and “low-stress” bikeways.
“A fundamental principle of Vision Zero is creating a comprehensive system," said Daniel Alexander, a planner for the city’s Department of Transportation Services who worked on the plan.
"It's no one silver bullet or tool that's going to get us there, but creating a system that has redundancies, that accepts that people will make mistakes and crashes will happen, but that we need to be making sure when they do happen, the severity is less," he said.
The plan also identifies “high-injury” locations where some of the city’s efforts should be focused. Those locations include 93 intersections and 39 miles of streets, mostly in urban Honolulu.
The state Legislature required the counties to create their own Vision Zero plans, which have already been adopted by other cities in the U.S.
The city is accepting public comments on the plan until June 26.
