Proven strategies to encourage safer roadway design
Background
Different roadway design elements can improve or reduce roadway safety. For example, providing a median crossing island for pedestrians on multi-lane roadways can reduce pedestrian crashes by over 30 percent.
The Vision Zero Community Toolkit is a resource intended to help community members residents understand and advocate for specific types of road safety designs to reduce crashes involving motor vehicles, bicyclists, and pedestrians. It consists of over 40 design treatments and outlines how each treatment can address road safety challenges in different contexts throughout Montgomery County.
This tool is the result of Montgomery Planning’s commitment to Vision Zero, a 2016 resolution through which Montgomery County pledged to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries. To advance the county toward Vision Zero, the County Executive released an initial two-year action plan of activities in 2017. Upon completion of the two-year action plan, the county has begun preparing a ten-year action plan to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries by 2030.
How to use the toolkit
The Vision Zero Community Toolkit will help you identify which design strategies are best suited for the specific safety challenges of your neighborhood. For example, certain treatments are aimed at reducing vehicles speeds, while others provide safer crossings for bicyclists and pedestrians. Because not all treatments are suited for all roadway types, this toolkit will highlight which ones are most effective in a given context. Once potential treatments have been identified, planners and engineers exercise judgement and consider location-specific factors to ensure that a treatment applies to the local conditions.
You can use this information, including the toolkit’s statistics, in written comments and at public hearings to support why a certain treatment would improve roadway safety in a plan or project area.
The choices we make while traveling, such as our speed and when we yield to other travelers, are not just based on individual judgement, but on how we react to a roadway’s design. With this toolkit, you can help make your neighborhood a safer place while supporting the county’s Vision Zero goals.
Staff Contact
Darcy Buckley
301-495-4514
Email