Santa Monica Safe Streets Alliance is a collaboration of local advocacy organizations and community members that together will promote and support implementation of our community’s shared goals of complete streets that are designed to be safe, equitable and welcoming to everyone.
In our home town in 2017, nine people were killed and 25 severely injured in collisions on the streets of Santa Monica, more than two-times the annual average of four fatalities in the years between 2006-2016. These collisions cannot be brushed aside as “accidents”: these crashes are predictable and therefore preventable. No traffic death is acceptable. We need meaningful and true commitment to the goals of safe streets by implementing Vision Zero. Vision Zero focuses on safe mobility for everyone — regardless of whether you walk, bike or drive a car.
It is time for a fresh approach. We can indeed design safe, livable and sustainable streets. To achieve these lofty goals we need a collaborated effort of community and civic stakeholders — including interdepartmental coordination of city divisions, and integration of projects and opportunities — education, transparent and appropriate enforcement, as well as complete street design that prioritizes safety and is engineered to reduce the effects of human error that result in fatalities or severe injuries.
Vision Zero began in Sweden 20 years ago. Since then they have cut traffic deaths in half (fewer that 3/100k compared to 11/100k in the US) while at the same time increasing their population and vehicle miles traveled. Numerous cities in the US have also adopted Vision Zero. In the three and half years since New York City adopted Vision Zero they have seen 23% fewer road fatalities. Closer to home, Fremont, California adopted Vision Zero in 2015 and has since seen a 25% reduction in traffic fatalities. We can do this!
In Santa Monica we are ahead of many cities leading with a vast array of mobility options. Our City Council adopted “A New Model of Mobility” as one of its five strategic goals in 2015. We have a clear direction to develop a diverse transportation ecosystem that is equitable and encourages walking, biking, public transit, van-pools as well as a variety of shared mobility options.
Our priority is to keep our community safe regardless of ability or mode of travel, mindful of our most vulnerable population.
The Santa Monica Safe Streets Alliance is asking you join us in our mission of safe streets for everyone — by taking our short survey to help us understand your priorities and by signing on to our Principles for Safe, Livable and Sustainable Streets in Santa Monica — copied and linked below.
TAKE OUR SURVEY HERE
Sign up here for email notification
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Download our Principles for Safe, Livable and Sustainable Streets document in English HERE and Spanish HERE.
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Principles for Safe, Livable and Sustainable Streets in Santa Monica
Santa Monica has reached an important inflection point for mobility and active transportation: the Expo Line has connected our community to the rest of the region; our bike share system has reached over 83,000 active users; pedestrian-friendly plans are taking hold. Yet, serious problems persist:
- Increasing traffic violence continues to afflict our community.
- Too many households do not have access to reliable and affordable mobility options.
- Our streets exacerbate environmental instability with local urban heat and water problems.
- Car-oriented streets increase traffic, CO2 and particle pollution thereby depleting air quality, public health and well-being.
New revenue streams, including state and local funding, present a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest tens of millions of dollars to reshape our City’s largest public space into a vital and safe infrastructure for connectivity, environmental resilience and community cohesion.
The following represent our “North Star” goals that should guide Santa Monica’s policy-makers to invest in complete streets that are safe and welcoming for everyone in the City of Santa Monica.
WE BELIEVE THAT:
- No traffic fatalities are acceptable. The City needs to follow best practices in engineering, enforcement and education in order to fulfill its commitment to “Vision Zero”: eliminating severe and fatal injury collisions by 2026. Traffic collisions must not be brushed aside as “accidents”: collisions are predictable and therefore preventable. These preventable collisions can be eliminated through education, enforcement and engineering. With the number of crashes involving fatalities or severe injuries climbing at alarming rates, we reaffirm that the time is now to make a strong commitment to Vision Zero with true and meaningful investments in safer streets.
- Invest resources to improve equity. Our transportation investments must be distributed equitably but should prioritize neighborhoods, residents and workers with the highest need and those who have been historically underserved. Scarce public resources should be directed towards communities that are most disproportionately impacted by pollution, traffic collisions and a lack of transportation options.
- All students and children have a right to walk, bike or scoot safely to school. Crashes are the leading cause of death for American children. Safe routes to schools facilitate and encourage active transportation, which enable academic performance, concentration and behavior. Active transportation benefits students regardless of age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity or prior achievement scores. As childhood obesity and inactivity are on the rise, active transportation options need significant support so that every student has the opportunity to safely travel on foot, bike, skateboard, etc. to school.
- Access for all. Our mobility and transportation systems should equitably serve Santa Monica residents and all those who study, work or visit in our community, regardless of gender, age, ability, income, race, or socioeconomic status. Transit service should be affordable for anyone. Everyone should feel personally safe when traveling through our community. To help ensure that commitment, our dedicated public safety officials should serve as a model of 21st Century constitutional policing.
- Our transportation system should generate zero emissions. Transportation emissions comprise 64% of Santa Monica’s climate-changing carbon pollution. Local air pollutants continue to diminish public health, particularly the health of residents living near major transportation corridors. We should invest our resources towards achieving a zero emissions bus and municipal fleet and aggressively facilitate a rapid transition to zero emission cars and trucks, including within less advantaged parts of our communities.
- Streets are our largest public space. Our streets occupy approximately 23% of our community space. Our streets do more than transport people and things. Street planning should integrate mobility and place-making to enhance social, economic and cultural opportunities, as well as our well-being needs. Our investments should uplift our main commercial corridors as the essential social and economic places. Priority on our roadways should address the modes of travel that use this scarce space most efficiently: public transit, walking, biking, etc. On-street parking is the private use of valuable public space; management of this public resource needs to reflect that reality.
- Streets are essential environmental systems. Our streets are critical components of our environmental and natural ecosystems that contribute to safeguarding water, air quality and climate resilience. We need to design our streets to capture rainwater to help replenish local supplies and divert polluted runoff from Santa Monica Bay. Paving with cool surfaces can reduce street temperatures by decreasing the heat created by asphalt. We need to protect and expand our urban forest to shade our streets, as well as clean our air and capture water.
- Community co-creation is essential to enduring change. Diverse community voices are critical for identifying core values and the vision for transformative change. Project development should proactively engage community stakeholders from inception to completion, with an emphasis on diverse, underrepresented and historically marginalized communities.
- Data drives decisions. We need to invest in robust, transparent collection and analysis of data that enable the community to give informed input for City officials to make thoughtful decisions. All public policy decisions involve difficult tradeoffs. Good data is essential for understanding what the tradeoffs are and to help provide transparency when challenging decisions are made. Good data is also the best bases of transparently and accurately measuring outcomes.
- Plan our city and mobility together. Our neighborhoods, community gathering spaces and employment and learning centers have a profound impact on our mobility options and choices. Policies on housing, open space, community facilities, commercial development, public spaces, and other land use policies should give priority to clean, affordable and sustainable mobility.
1 https://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html
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Open Houses: Stewart / Pennsylvania Bike & Pedestrian Project
Please join us at an Open House hosted by City of Santa Monica Planning for the Stewart and Pennsylvania Avenue Bike and Pedestrian Improvement project. There are two dates you can attend, December 14th or December 18th (see links below). There is also an interactive map to review and provide comments online. We were excited to give input to help shape the project to date and look forward to community input to help further build a project that will best serve equitable mobility in a safer, healthy and active Santa Monica.
Together we can create a safe and friendly community for everyone.
See more on Project Goals and Project Elements HERE
Calendar events HERE
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Westside Global Climate Strike
A coalition of youth-driven groups are organizing a LA regional climate strike on November 29th, Black Friday, at Tongva Park in downtown Santa Monica, 12-3PM. Alexandria Villasenor, the Fridays For Future activist from New York, co-founder of US Youth Climate Strike and founder of Earth Uprising will attend and be one of the speakers at the strike. A march is planned through Downtown Santa Monica, a die-in, live performances, networking time, tabling for organizations and media presence.
Regardless of why you ride a bicycle – our beloved bicycles are zero emission and part of climate crisis solutions!
“We would love to turn out a contingent of people of all ages – with all kinds of bikes – to make the point that bicycles are part of climate solutions”
The strike is organized by multigenerational activists from all different organizations, ally businesses, and schools including Paul Revere Middle School, Santa Monica High, Pali High, Venice High, Loyola Marymount University and Santa Monica College.
See our the event page HERE
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October 17th, Wilshire Safety Study Community Meeting 2 at Planning Commission
Please join us and attend this second community workshop at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, east wing (1155 Main Street, Santa Monica). The is a special meeting of the Planning Commission to introduce a range of safety treatments and continue community input.
See our the event page HERE
Provide transportation safety input via the Take the Friendly Road interactive map.
Live or work in the neighborhood and want to participate in the community listening workshops?
– Click here to sign up for City updates
– Contact the project team at Safe.Wilshire@smgov.net
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June 8th Wilshire Safety Study Community Meeting
The City of Santa Monica is conducting a roadway safety analysis for Wilshire Boulevard between Ocean Ave. and Centinela Ave. We want your help to identify safety issues and concerns!
Please join us and attend this first community workshop on June 8th at Reed Park Auditorium (1133 7th Street, Santa Monica). The meeting is open house format, so drop-in anytime.
See our the event page HERE
Provide transportation safety input via the Take the Friendly Road interactive map.
Live or work in the neighborhood and want to participate in the community listening workshops?
– Click here to sign up for City updates
– Contact the project team at Safe.Wilshire@smgov.net
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July 24th Safe Streets for 17th Street & Michigan Avenue
goes before Santa Monica City Council
We LOVE this project.
You can explore more HERE and HERE
Read more on our support HERE and our support letter linked:
2018 July 24 Council Agenda Item 8C SM Spoke CASM SaMoSSA
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July 14th Kidical Mass: Douglas Park 9-11am
Climate Corp collects Santa Monica Safe Streets Alliance Surveys
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July 4th Fireworks at Santa Monica College
Climate Corp collects Santa Monica Safe Streets Alliance Surveys
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Community Meeting Sat, Feb. 24th
Join the Santa Monica Safe Streets Alliance team to hear how we will help create Safe Streets in Santa Monica with your input and Vision Zero.
Day: Saturday, February 24th
Where: Colorado Center Community Room, 2500 Broadway, across from Helen’s
Time: 1:30 – 3:00pm
At this gathering we will hear from City staff on Santa Monica’s Mobility Plan and how the City plans to implement Vision Zero to achieve zero traffic fatalities by 2026. This is a critical time for our community to make sure our streets are safe. There will be opportunity for questions, individual input and ways for you to get involved.
About the Santa Monica Safe Streets Alliance:
Santa Monica Safe Streets Alliance is a collaboration of local advocacy organizations and community members that together will promote and support implementation of our community’s shared goals of complete streets that are designed to be safe, equitable and welcoming to everyone.
In our home town in 2017, nine people were killed and 25 severely injured in collisions on the streets of Santa Monica, more than two-times the annual average of four fatalities in the years between 2006-2016. These collisions cannot be brushed aside as “accidents”: these crashes are predictable and therefore preventable. No traffic death is acceptable. We need meaningful and true commitment to the goals of safe streets by implementing Vision Zero. Vision Zero focuses on safe mobility for everyone — regardless of whether you walk, bike or drive a car.
It is time for a fresh approach. We can indeed design safe, livable and sustainable streets. To achieve these lofty goals we need a collaborated effort of community and civic stakeholders — including interdepartmental coordination of city divisions, and integration of projects and opportunities — education, transparent and appropriate enforcement, as well as complete street design that prioritizes safety and is engineered to reduce the effects of human error that result in fatalities or severe injuries.
Vision Zero began in Sweden 20 years ago. Since then they have cut traffic deaths in half (fewer that 3/100k compared to 11/100k in the US) while at the same time increasing their population and vehicle miles traveled. Numerous cities in the US have also adopted Vision Zero. In the three and half years since New York City adopted Vision Zero they have seen 23% fewer road fatalities. Closer to home, Fremont, California adopted Vision Zero in 2015 and has since seen a 25% reduction in traffic fatalities. We can do this!
In Santa Monica we are ahead of many cities leading with a vast array of mobility options. Our City Council adopted “A New Model of Mobility” as one of its five strategic goals in 2015. We have a clear direction to develop a diverse transportation ecosystem that is equitable and encourages walking, biking, public transit, van-pools as well as a variety of shared mobility options.
Our priority is to keep our community safe regardless of ability or mode of travel, mindful of our most vulnerable population.
Santa Monica Safe Streets Alliance asks you to join us in this vision of safe streets for everyone — by signing on to our principles. Coming soon.