Traffic Safety

Traffic Safety

Improving traffic safety affects everyone who uses public sidewalks, streets, runways or trails which make up the City of Longmont’s transportation system. This includes you, if you walk, roll, bicycle, drive, or take public or private transit. It is the responsibility of everyone using our transportation system to make decisions that keep others and themselves safe.

Vision Zero

Vision Zero is not a program, but rather a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable transportation options for all. Can you imagine a world where no one dies in a roadway crash?

To that end, the City of Longmont has adopted Vision Zero as a cross-departmental and inter-disciplinary initiative with the goal to reduce all traffic deaths and severe injuries on city roadways to zero by 2040. This is a fundamental transformation in the City’s approach to traffic safety in prioritizing human life over the movement of motor vehicles.

Vision Zero uses the human-centered and proactive Safe Systems Approach which is based on the following principles:

• People Make Mistakes: Our transportation system should be designed and operated to accommodate inevitable mistakes and to avoid death and severe injuries.
• People Are Vulnerable: Human bodies have limits for tolerating crash forces, so we should design and operate our transportation system to recognize and accommodate human vulnerabilities.
• Safety is Proactive: Strategies should proactively identify and mitigate risks in the transportation system, rather than waiting for crashes to occur before reacting.
• Death/Serious Injury is Unacceptable: While no crashes is desirable, the Safe System approach prioritizes reducing crashes that result in loss of life and serious injuries. No one should experience either when using the transportation system.
• Responsibility is Shared: All transportation system users, managers, and suppliers/manufactures must ensure that crashes do not lead to fatal or serious injuries.
• Redundancy is Crucial: Reducing risks requires that all parts of the transportation system are strengthened, so that if one part fails, the other parts still protect people.

Learn more about:

• The Safe System Approach 
• Vision Zero
• The Safe Systems Approach and Vision Zero

Stay Informed and Get Involved

As the City of Longmont begins to transform the way we build, rebuild, and manage our transportation system, we will be reaching out to the Longmont community to gather your insights and experience. Please complete the form below to receive updates, provide feedback, and express your level of interest in participating on Longmont’s first Vision Zero Task Force. The Task Force will collaborate on developing Longmont’s first Vision Zero Equitable Action Plan.