City of Worcester’s Post

Transcript

The city recently shared the first phase of initiatives the Department of Transportation and Mobility will be rolling out as part of its Vision 0 plan. My name's Tom Matthews, and on this episode of The Buzz, I'll be talking to the city manager to find out what those initiatives are and how they will improve Rd. safety in the city. Alright, Mr. Manager, the city just recently announced the first phase of initiatives for Vision 0. Before we get into all of that, can you give us a reminder of what Vision 0 is? Yeah, Vision 0 is an international St. safety movement that really is dedicated to eliminating fatalities. We took on this initiative to make sure that we reduce our fatalities in the city and get to the point of 0. So let's get into these initiatives. What is the first phase of steps that the city is taking as we work on the Vision 0 plan? Yeah, there's a number of things that are happening under the first phase. Within the first phase, we're looking at the reduction of the speed limit and that was endorsed and supported by the City Council. We're looking at a rapper response program and we're also looking to release story maps of Vision 0 to inform people and keep people up to date on what's happening in our community. And we're hoping and then the installation of a further speed humps, not only. Temporary speed humps, but also permanent speed humps in the city, right. So that phase includes a number of steps that we're hoping to achieve in the next few months and and also in the next year. Awesome. And that first step you mentioned was a reduction in the speed limit down to 25. Worry at with that. What's the timeline on the on that rolling out? So the speed limit has been adopted by the City Council. Right now we're working through the contracting to make sure we get these signs posted. The ordinance is in effect. However, we need to do our job in getting the signs posted. We also need to educate the public. We're going to be working with Austin Police Department making sure that we're informing the public, sharing as much information and educating folks about the 25 miles of zone here in the city. And part of that, people always talking about enforcement. Can you talk about how enforcement will will play into this? You've heard me talk about the importance of engineering education and enforcement. And enforcement is part of what Vision 0 is. And the enforcement is part of the importance of making sure that our streets are safe. And so we're working with Police Department. They have a the traffic division, they've enhanced their team quite a bit. They've bought new technology to help us. Enhance these enforcement mechanisms, are they gonna be out there? They're gonna be providing some opportunities where they're gonna be paying attention to all the drivers and the behaviors that people have in the road users and the collaboration and the partnership of doing all of that. It's going to be extremely important to help reduce the speed limit here in the city. All right, so you mentioned the rapid response program. I want to get into that. What is that all about? Oftentimes when there's an accident, Police Department, they're reconstruction team shows up, they evaluate the scene, they take evidence, they take information, they take pictures, they do everything that they need to do. To make sure they capture as much information from that scene, but what historically has happened, they leave that scene and then the Police Department uses that information for their insurance purposes or medical purposes, etcetera. What we want to do now as a city is we want to bring our Department of Transportation and Mobility to come after and to work with the Police Department and then evaluate and assess what do we need to do? Should we have a crosswalk? Do we need to improve the the striping? Do we need to enhance a curb cut? Et cetera, what are the things that we need to do as a city to make sure that an accident doesn't happen here again? Or what is it about the accident that that we learned that actually we should have some more safety measures in place and so that we want to be able to introduce this program and we're happy right now. So we're going to start that process. Can you give us any examples of areas, locations in the city where a crash may have occurred in DTM has gone out and assess the assess the area and identified immediate steps and actions that they can take. Yeah, there's been a couple of places on one particular spin. We've had a recent death on Ludlow St. That was a very tragic moment for our community, for the families, and that's an area that DTM was able to come in, evaluate and assess and then be able to then implement some some new strategies. We added some new crosswalks to that area and try to bring some signage and visibility as well. All of that is extremely important to make sure that we keep our residents safe. I also just want to mention right now we're on Belmont St. A a highly trafficked St. There's a lot of, we got to school right behind us. What do we have right behind us? You can see some of the work that the DTM has done to to make this a much more safer Rd. for people to cross. Yeah. So Belmont Street is a very, very active St. You can see it, you can hear it. There's not one second where a car isn't going by and multiple cars. We have multiple lanes going down, one lane going up. And this has been a major improvement. Working with Mass dot and the state, they've been able to make some significant improvement because this is a Route 9. This is the state. Broadway and so one of the things that we've been working with Mass dot is so how do we enhance the safety of pedestrians and rose users here. And So what you see behind us here is the rapper flashing beacon and the idea is for as soon as you press the button light is flashing it alerts the drivers you got to slow down someone wants to cross and that gives you a sense of of safety when you want to cross but also drivers are more alerted that there's somebody that's going to be able to cross So again, these are the types of things that we want to be able to do more in the city so. Enhance the safety of our residency. Alright, so you mentioned speed humps. I know the city historically has had a temporary pilot speed hump program. That means speed humps are put in, but they're taking out. Come winter months, cities gonna be launching a permanent speed home program. We've heard a lot from residents the effectiveness of these speed humps in their neighborhoods and they've worked well. It's helped to reduce speeds and residents cycle. We've also learned that they haven't impacted other safety vehicles when there's a fire truck or any other safety vehicles. And so we felt as though this is a great opportunity for us to now think about implementing them permanently. So we what? We've done is we've taken an overview of all the temporary areas that we've added in the city and where does it merit to actually have a permanent. And so we've been working with district councillors and residents to ensure that we select the right places and we put the right installation of a speed hump there so that prevalently it helps to reduce the speed and it helps to reduce some of the impact into that neighborhood. Alright, Mr. Manager, you mentioned a story map earlier. The city just released one. It's called the draft priority network. What is the story map and what is the draft priority network? So the draft priority network is a network basically that gives us the ability to understand and know what are the priorities in the city that we need to address. What are the high incident priority areas in the city? Where are we seeing the most crashes, most issues? And what do we need to do as a city to be able to rectify, mitigate some of those issues by adding certain elements, not to improve the safety. And so we're utilizing story maps to be able to do that. And story maps is a way that we are now using to communicate to the public because it's a very. Interactive tool. It's an online tool that provides you mapping. It's available for anyone right now. You can go to the website willshowme.gov and you can see all the story mess that we've been able to implement, but this one's gonna be even more interactive because of the mapping mechanisms that it has. Cool. Alright, And so closing here, Mr. Manager, People are watching what can residents do to improve Rd. safety here in the city? Sometimes what happens when we have a conversation? Overall safety, most people tend to blame each other. Vehicles blame the people walking, the people walking blamed the vehicles, and everybody's pointing fingers. But at the end of the day, it's everyone's responsibility. It's my responsibility to pay attention to the signs, to pay attention to the things that are within the road, to users, the people that are walking. But then also as a Walker, it's my responsibility to make sure that I'm paying attention to the signs, utilizing the signals, utilizing the crosswalks, paying attention to the vehicles that are driving in the streets, utilizing the rapid flashing beacons as well. Doing everything that I can as a pedestrian to not put myself in harm's way. Some people are distracted walking and looking down on their cell phones. Again, we all need to be active in the way we utilize our our network because it's everyone's responsibility. Alright, thanks a lot of good work. There's still a lot of work to do, but thank you for giving us an overview of the first phase of the Vision 0 initiatives. And thank you for tuning in. As always, make sure you give us a follow on social media. Head on over to worcesterma.gov to find out everything else that's happening in the city.