For residents traveling by foot, bike, scooter, wheelchair, or car, traveling on Durham’s streets can be a perilous pursuit.
But at a city council work session last Thursday, Lauren Grove, the city’s Vision Zero coordinator, presented her recommendations for a Vision Zero Action Plan, a proposal for how the city would confront Durham’s growing traffic violence issue head-on.
From 2019 to 2023, Durham residents suffered 278 serious injuries, up from 177 the previous five years, and 121 fatalities in the same timeframe, up from 97. Black and Hispanic residents are at higher risk, making up 51 percent of the population combined but 68 percent of fatalities.
The city first adopted Vision Zero, a multinational movement to reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries, in 2017. Vision Zero is akin to the Paris Climate Accords; communities across the world coalesce around a set of guidelines and principles to reduce traffic violence, and adopt Vision Zero on their own timeline.
Last year, Durham City Council adopted a new resolution to reinforce its commitment to Vision Zero by including a target date: reduce deaths and serious injuries by 50 percent by 2035, and eliminate them by 2045.
Grove recommended six main policies to help the city meet its goal: update the city’s land use code, create a street design manual, conduct more routine safety assessments, improve streets more rapidly, manage safe speeds, and share traffic safety insights.
Some of these policies are already in motion. Durham’s Planning Department has its hands full rewriting the joint city-county Unified Development Ordinance, the rules that govern development. Last fall, the city council also adopted the NACTO guidelines, a set of national design standards for transportation networks. The standards brought forth by the Vision Zero Action Plan will be baked into those frameworks to make policies consistent across internal city and county departments as well as external rules that govern private development.
Even with these new standards, for the action plan to be successful, Grove said, the city will need to improve how it tracks and leverages information on crashes and fatalities to measure the effectiveness of different policy interventions and make recommendations that can be acted on swiftly and save lives.
Council member Nate Baker, who encouraged city council to adopt the NACTO standards, called traffic violence a “pandemic that not only doesn’t go away, it gets worse every single year,” during the presentation.
Seventy-four percent of incidents that lead to death or injury happen on streets that make up the city’s “high-injury network” which accounts for just 10 percent of Durham streets. And just nine percent of streets in Durham have more than two lanes but they account for 59 percent of fatal crashes. Without changes to the built environment, speeding and reckless driving are much harder to curb.
“This is why we see so many of the same streets appearing in fatal and serious injury crashes over and over,” Grove said. “These aren’t just random incidents, they’re patterns.”
The Vision Zero team plans to create a public-facing data dashboard for residents to monitor the program’s progress and input incidents themselves. Grove said they also plan to present crash data and other important metrics during regular updates with the city council.
Advocates like John Tallmadge, executive director at Bike Durham who spoke during public comment, have been “frustrated with the slow pace of change” on Durham’s streets. Tallmadge said at the World Day of Remembrance in November 2022, advocates called on city council and staff to do two things: hire a Vision Zero coordinator, and create a Vision Zero Action Plan. A year later, the city hired Grove to lead its Vision Zero…vision.
“I believe in a theory of change that to be able to move more quickly on these changes, you need champions on staff, champions on the elected board, and champions on the outside,” Tallmadge says. “I think we’re at a good time for that.”
At the previous work session on March 6, council member Carl Rist suggested that reaching the city’s Vision Zero goals would be nearly impossible without addressing main one-way streets across downtown Durham and beyond: Roxboro and Mangum Street, and Duke and Gregson Street.
Transportation Director Sean Egan responded by saying that, “there’s a definition of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I think it’s difficult to expect a different result unless we make really significant changes to these roadways.”
Newly-minted city manager Bo Ferguson said it wasn’t clear, yet, that the two-way conversions are the answer.
“Let’s let the data lead us and certainly we’ll be transparent with what our studies find,” he said.
The Vision Zero Action Plan may have gotten a ringing endorsement from the city council, but in the race for city council budget priorities, two-way conversions ranked slightly below middle of the pack. The project costs are estimated at around $5.5 million and Duke and Gregson are managed by the state, not the city. Council may have more of a spiritual appetite than a financial one for dealing with its two major downtown thoroughfares, even if they are in the high-injury network.
The city transportation department will have to work with its partners at NCDOT, who own and manage a majority of the major roads in Durham’s network to come up with solutions. The two departments have not always seen eye-to-eye on how to approach updating state-owned roadways. In the past few years, disagreements have led to project delays, causing some concern about whether reaching Vision Zero is possible without a unified vision.
“If we’re not going to do these corridors now, when in the next 20 years are we going to do that if we’re serious about meeting our Vision Zero goals?” says Chris Perelstein, a bike advocate who spoke at the March 20 work session.
Roxboro and Mangum are especially infamous thanks to Perelstein, who created the “Reckless Roxboro” Twitter account to track speeding in front of his home on Roxboro Street using cameras and software he developed. He says, despite the speeding issues that Roxboro continues to suffer from, he isn’t tied to the idea of changing the street to two-way, but instead is focused on supporting the best solution to get projects done quickly so that more residents can experience the benefits of a pedestrian-friendly transportation network.
“If you can push the needle on infrastructure, you’re going to start having people experience these environments that are much more pleasant for them to be in,” Perelstein says. “And I think that’s going to drive more buy-in in the future, which then hopefully will get more infrastructure changes. I think that one begets the other.”
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to jlaidlaw@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.