City Planning Commission - public_hearing

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight to learn more about the City of Minneapolis Vision Zero Action Plan 2026-2030 update. My name is Antonio Rosel. I am the City of Minneapolis Vision Zero Program Coordinator, and I am very happy to be joining you tonight to talk about the plan. I have with me two members of our team, Roman Kiefer and Victoria Halloran, and they'll be assisting during the meeting to help take your questions and comments. Maybe I'm going to bring them on for just a quick second so that they can say hello. As Roman and Victoria, thank you very much for being here tonight and helping run this wonderful meeting we're going to have to talk about this important project. So I'm going to start the presentation now and we'll get started.

Second.

So welcome. You have met now the three people that are running the meeting here from the city of Minneapolis. I want to make sure that you know that we are very interested in getting your questions and comments on the plan. And of course, questions that may come up for you as we are going through the presentation tonight. There is a button available in your screen. It says Q&A. If you type your question, if you hit that button and type your question in the dialogue that comes up, we'll get all the questions in a queue. And after the presentation tonight, we will go through and answer as many of the questions as we can. If we can't get to your question tonight, the answers to the questions will be written in a follow-up document that will be available at the project website. Now, something else, too, that I want to make sure to say right as we're starting, this presentation tonight is kind of an overview and an introduction to the draft Vision Zero action plan, and we want to get your comments on the plan itself. when you get a chance to read it. And so what we would like to invite you to do is to download the plan and review the plan carefully with as much interest as you feel is necessary and provide your comments in the links that are provided at the same place where the plan is available. And that is, you can just simply Google Minneapolis Vision Zero and it'll bring you right to the page. And if you are joining us from one of the emails that were sent, the link to all of those pages is included in that. So here's a brief overview of our agenda for tonight. We're going to provide an introduction to the Vision Zero Action Plan. We'll discuss what's in the plan. I'll review some of the safety information, some of the data that is part of the plan's foundation. We'll talk a little bit about how actions in the plan are organized and then how to comment on the plan and send us your questions. So with that, let's start diving in. So to put Vision Zero in context and to kind of explain a little bit of why it is that this is something that we are working on, did you know that between 2016 and 2025, so over the last 10 years, did you know that in the city of Minneapolis, almost 160 people have been killed in traffic crashes in our city? Did you also know that if you combine that number of people who have perished with the number of people who have suffered life-altering injuries, serious injuries, we're almost, we're way over 1,500 people over the last 10 years. And those are, each one of those fatalities, each one of those injuries have lifelong impacts, not only for the person who is affected and who may actually, that may be the end of their life, but for people who survive them, their families, their loved ones, and for the people who are injured, who have to deal with a permanent or disabling condition after. This is a serious issue, of course, throughout the country and throughout the world. In the United States every year, generally the average is about 40,000 people per year are killed in traffic crashes. Last year was one, you know, that trend has thankfully been getting better and still a gigantic number of fatalities, 36,000 people were killed in traffic crashes in the United States last year. And generally, to an estimate for the number of people who are seriously injured, it's 10 to 20 times as many people as are killed are seriously injured and suffered debilitating or permanent injuries. And so about 400,000 people in the United States are killed or seriously injured every year because of traffic crashes. Worldwide, the numbers are, of course, even larger. 1.2 million people per year worldwide are killed in traffic crashes. And 15 to 22 million people are seriously injured or killed. And so, you know, again, there's not usually perfect data about this, but the numbers are generally consistent. And so when we start thinking about those impacts and how they affect our fellow residents of Minneapolis and our community and the people that we know and love and who live with us in this same city, we see that it's a... a pretty gigantic impact. And this is just a small image here summarizing just the names of people who have been killed in Minneapolis streets over the last three years from 2022 to 2025. people from every single community, every walk of life, and they are leaving behind their own promise in their life, their children, their mothers, their fathers, sisters, brothers, every single name, Aaron, Penelope, Alethea, Einar, Ariel, Jeffrey, Casey, every single one of them is a story. Vision Zero is a response to this tragedy that occurs in our streets and in the streets of all major cities. It's an international movement actually that says basically any fatality, any serious injury in our streets is not acceptable and we must prioritize actions to make sure that these tragedies don't continue to happen. The Vision Zero action plan is a tool that the city of Minneapolis has put together to address this problem in our city and to make our streets safe for everyone. The history of the Vision Zero plans is interesting as well for our city. And here on your screen, you can see the cover of the latest draft, the draft that we are sharing with you tonight, the 2026-2030 plan. This is actually the third edition of the plan. Minneapolis's work and Vision Zero started in almost 10 years ago in 2017 when the city council passed a resolution saying, you know, we need to address the situation in our streets. We will not accept any fatalities. from traffic crashes, any serious injuries from traffic crashes in our streets, we're going to work towards eliminating them, to bringing them to zero. And that's where Vision Zero is. We envision zero fatalities and serious injuries. There have been, as I mentioned, this is the third edition of the plan. The first plan was completed in 2019, and it covered the term from 2020 to 2022. It outlined actions to address the streets where a larger number of injuries were occurring. And then after that, the 2020 to 2022 term, there was a second plan that covered the 2023 to 2025 year term with a set of actions, again, to address where these crashes were occurring. The 2026-2030 update As you notice as you may have noticed includes a longer time frame so it's no longer a two year time frame it's a four year time frame. Part of the reason for that is that we want to align the actions that are in this plan and the following plan which will be developed in 2030 with the new upcoming. transportation action plan that the city will be developing in 2029 and 2030 so that the two plans are as closely aligned as possible because we want to make sure that when we're thinking about transportation in terms of movement or getting to destinations we're also thinking about how we make those movements and those facilities that facilitate that movement safer for every single person in our city. Every time, another reason why this update now includes this term is that we are including, we are updating it with information that we have gathered from crashes that have occurred in the previous five years as well, so that we have new data informing our recommendations. The plan in itself has two principal components. One of the components and kind of the foundation for the plan is data that we have gathered on crashes occurring in our city, the types of crashes, where are they occurring, what is causing them. And then the second part of the plan, of the action plan, and it's an action plan, so the actions that we are committing to as a city to work to implement to address those crashes that are occurring. The first component is information based on evidence that we have gathered, and then the actions are how we're going to address those issues that are occurring in our city. This plan is an update, again, of the previous plan, which was an update, and the original plan, which was an update, but this update includes new information on crashes and locations of those streets where crashes are occurring more frequently. And so that helps us to target efforts to those particular locations. And then the other component of this is, of course, the actions. The actions are updated. And they're updated because, first of all, they are different locations that have different contexts where we have to tailor approaches to them. But we also include results from research that is conducted by the city of Minneapolis itself on the treatments that we deploy and from national research on what are the effective tools that we can use to address these types of crashes. We also have updated measurements for how we're going to be tracking success or failure in our interventions. So, let's talk a little bit about the 1st component, which is the crash data and statistics. And if you're interested in learning more about some of this crash data, you can find it 1st of all in our vision 0 plan. So, in this document that we're discussing, there's quite a bit more than what I'm going to share with you right now. But also the foundation document for that is another document that you can access if you would like to. And this is a crash study, a Division Zero crash study that gathers information of all the crashes that have occurred in Minneapolis between 2020 and 2025. And so there's all kinds of statistics and data. And that information we summarize and we have placed in the action plan for context as well for the actions that follow. So here I'm going to share with you just a few key findings from the crash study. And here's a few things. The number of crashes in 2025 have actually decreased a little bit over the previous years. They were at a relatively low level for a while. Then they grew in 2020, and then they have begun to decline. And for several reasons, we won't get into it right now, but in the reports, you will be able to see some of the reasons and and how we're helping to make sure that those trends continue in a direction of decrease. Speeding is one of the most common factors that are involved in fatal crashes in our city. High rates of speed are tremendously dangerous for people when they are hit, if they are walking, if they are bicycling, or if they're inside another motor vehicle. The impact energy increases exponentially with speed. Another key finding from the crash study that you will see also in our action plan is that there is significant disproportionate impacts on different populations in our city. Native American and Black residents of Minneapolis are impacted more often, they're more frequently victims of crashes in our city. Pedestrian crashes, bicycle crashes, automobile crashes. Another important contributing factor in serious injury crashes, in addition to speeding, is drivers failing to yield when they are turning. Here's a chart comparing crashes in our city over the last 10 years. This is part of what we gather for the statistics that we want to address. And you can see the years are at the bottom of the chart, 2016, 2017, et cetera, going up to 2025, as you can see here. I want to direct your attention to some of the colors here on each of the charts. In the bottom of the bars, you see a number in a blue kind of area. Blue is the number of bicyclists, bicycle riders who were killed that year. In the green is the number of pedestrians. who were killed in traffic crashes that year. In the gray color is the number of motorcycle riders or motorcycle passengers who were killed that year. And in the blue, the lighter blue near the top of the bar, is the number of motor vehicle drivers or occupants who were killed in traffic crashes that year. And the number at the top is the sum of all of those. And so you can see that from 2019, well, starting in 2018, there was an increase that really accelerated to 2021 in the number of fatal crashes in our city and has been thankfully decreasing. And part of our challenge and part of our work is to make sure that these numbers continue to decrease because we are working to get towards zero in our streets. Here's another chart that I think you will find interesting as well. And kind of tells the same story. This chart includes the fatal crashes that you saw in the previous chart and also serious injuries. And again, serious injuries are those that may include a permanent debilitating injury for a person, loss of a limb, et cetera. Very, very serious injuries and with very significant impacts in their life for the remainder of their lives. Again, for the base year 2016, 2017, going on to 2025, you can see an increase in serious injury and fatal crashes, again, starting around 2019 and then beginning to decrease. And again, thankfully, you know, and it's our purpose of our work to make sure that this this trend continues to decrease towards zero. Here I want to share with you a map that kind of summarizes where these crashes are taking place in Minneapolis. And you will see there's a number of layers on the map, but I want to maybe the blue lines on the map and the blue lines are under other color maps, other color lines as well, but the underneath Blue lines, which in some places show a little bit like green because of the combination of colors. But those thick lines are what we call high injury streets. And these are the streets where a majority of the serious or fatal crashes in Minneapolis occurred. between the years 2020 and 2024. So in that period, about 64% of all crashes occurred in these streets, which are only 10% of our streets. So a lot of crashes occur in these streets. A disproportionate share of crashes occur in these streets. And part of it is that there may be higher traffic volumes or higher speeds or particular issues with these specific streets. And part of the reason why we like to look at and develop this information is that it helps us to focus limited resources on specific places where we know that we can address a greater number of unsafe situations. So we want to make sure that we direct resources here in order to decrease crashes and decreased fatalities and serious injuries. Another important set of maps that is part of kind of the story that we want to share with you in the Vision Zero Action Plan is the story of disproportionate impacts. And these are where particular populations, and you heard me say something about that just a few slides ago. What you see on the screen here on the map of Minneapolis are these light blue areas. And these are what we call transportation equity priority areas. And these are places where we have populations that, for example, don't have access to a car and depend on being able to walk safely to transit in order to get somewhere or to walk to their destination or to bike to their destination. interesting, but also disturbing and sad about what this story that is telling us is that these blue areas, you know, which are these transportation equity priority areas, really encompass only about 20% of all of the streets in Minneapolis. And these areas are where about 30%, a little bit under 30% of our population lives. But It's where 55% of all of the fatal crashes in the city take place. And so there is kind of a very serious inequity and disproportion in this. And so this also helps us. This is why they are called equity priority areas, transportation equity priority areas, because there are... negative impacts which are accruing to people who live in these areas. And part of our obligation is to figure out how we can resolve and address these issues so that people who live in these areas can have access to safe transportation, safe ways to get to the places they need to in their daily lives. Here's another aspect of some of the disproportionate impacts that we mentioned earlier. This is a summation of traffic deaths organized by ethnicity or by the race of the victim of the traffic crash. And you can see it. It may be a little confusing to read at first, so I'm going to just kind of quickly run through it. In the blue bar, you see the percentage of population that that particular ethnic group is in Minneapolis. So for example, here you see a blue bar with a white population. White people are about 58% of the population of Minneapolis. Black people are about 19% of the population in Minneapolis, and so on. The second group of bars is the percent of fatal vehicle crashes that that population experiences. The white population experiences about 33% of the fatal vehicle crashes that occur in Minneapolis. The black population of Minneapolis experiences about a little more than 40% of all of the the fatal vehicle crashes. And then, In the gray, the gray bar is the percent of the fatal pedestrian and bicycle crashes that these populations experience. And so we go, for example, to the Native American population group, and reading those bars, we see Native American people are about 2% of the population of the city, but they are 7% of the population victims of fatal vehicle crashes as drivers or occupants, and 8% of the fatal pedestrian and bicycle crashes. And so a much larger share than the population that they make up in the city. And so this is how we can begin to investigate and find that these are continuing issues in our city. It's one of the things that we look at when we are looking at crashes and how they are impacting people. Another disproportion in how crashes are distributed has to do with the mode of transportation that a person is using. And here the colors mean a little bit, something a little different, so I'm gonna explain that again. So here you see three different modes, bicycling, walking, and driving or being in a car. In the blue bar, you see the percentage of trips that each of those modes represents. So for the cars, for example, 75% of all the trips in the city are made via an automobile. 17% of all the trips in the city are made via walking. 3% of all of the trips in the city are made by bicycle. In the green bar, you see what percentage of the fatal crashes or serious injury crashes are related to each of these modes. And so car drivers, they are 75% of the trips, car drivers or passengers, they're 48%. percent of the fatal or serious crash victims. People who are walking, who are 17 percent of the trips, are actually 30 percent. So a much larger proportion of fatal or serious injury crashes. And the same with bicycling being 3 percent of all trips, but are actually overrepresented as 10 percent of all fatal and serious injury crashes. Here's a summation of factors that contribute to crashes. And crashes usually don't have one single cause and actually oftentimes have two or three or four contributing causes. But these are factors that actually come from police reports that are compiled after fatal or serious injury crashes. And so we compile them and we review them for the city. And this is what we learn. The most common contributing factors are a driver failing to yield when turning. And that will impact a person walking or a person bicycling across or another driver in another car who may be in kind of the wrong place at the wrong time. Driver speeding. is a very significant factor in fatal and serious crashes in our city running red lights. And you can imagine, for example, in the case of multiple factors in a crash, a driver speeding through an intersection and running a red light. So then you have two contributing factors and then impacting somebody who may be walking or biking or driving. There's another set of factors that are not usually included in Police reports, mostly because it's sometimes hard to determine. Distracted driving, for example, is something that is not included in the list because in the police reports, it's very hard to ascertain exactly what the driver was doing or if they were distracted or not. Sometimes the same with impaired driving, depending on the substance that may have been at play. So that is a little bit of a summary of the data that is the foundation. And as I said, the plan has two main components. We just covered the first one right here, crash data and statistics. And I'm going to do two things. I'm going to encourage you to, if you have any questions, to get to the Q&A dialogue and type your question on any of the things that we have covered now. And I don't know if, Victoria, do we have any questions that we may wish to answer now, or should we, any that are related to the material we just covered, Victoria?

We do have a question about trends in vehicle size in Minneapolis, and if that's impacted the data in regards to trends in serious injuries and fatalities. They're specifically thinking of the increased adoption of giant SUVs and trucks?

You know, that is a great question. We, at this moment, don't have data. We haven't compiled data on that, but it's something that we are thinking about right now. And actually, we are, you know, as one of the leaders in the country in this Vision Zero work, we are part of a national network of other cities that it's actually a peer network where we work discuss with each other trends that we see in each other's cities and potential ways of addressing it. And we actually had a meeting conversation, you know, through our teams meeting just like this, but with a lot of different cities yesterday when we were talking about this very same issue. You know, how it is that you know, we may need to start bringing that data in and also to participate in broader conversations to address that as a policy, right? Because, I mean, there's a lot more awareness of this issue now, just even in the general culture. I think the New York Times had a pretty amazing story with a lot of data and infographics a week or two ago. But yeah, great question. It's something that we are thinking about right now. Our current data, the data that you see in this plan does not reflect that, but it's something that we are thinking about and other cities in the United States are thinking about as well. Well, I think if Maybe we go to the next section then, if we only had 1 question and thank you Victoria for bringing that question up here too. And thank you for our participants for providing that. Okay. So here's the, the next portion of our presentation today. 2 main components. For the plan, we just talked about crash data and statistics. Well. Now we're going to talk about actions. How do we address these conditions that we have studied and compiled these statistics for? Well, the plan has a number of actions to respond, more than 80 actions. And 80 actions sounds like a lot. It is a lot. One of the ways to help to organize our response and to be able to strategize to resolve these issues is to begin to group some of these ideas. And see, we've come up with a grouping of four systems. to help to address these issues. The first system has to do with the physical design of our streets. How it is that signals and facilities like intersections and crossings, how we develop them, how wide are lanes, how do we calm traffic speeds. The second system has to do with how we encourage people to behave in a safe way while they're using the infrastructure. The third system has to do with the vehicles themselves. And this question that just came up about vehicle sizes, this would be the place where some of those initiatives might land. And the last system, which is really the foundation for all of the systems is data, safety data, having a data-driven approach. And you saw that we just spent the first half of our time talking about talking about some of that data, some of those statistics, because we want to make sure that we gather data, that we do so in a consistent way, and that we bring that data as a way to orient the plan's actions and the investments that the city can make. So we'll talk a little bit about each one of these, and we'll start with safe streets. Safe streets includes things like crosswalks and signals and medians and bump outs and all of the different ways in which we can channel and come traffic speeds so that they are compatible for all users, safer for drivers, safer for bicycle riders, safer for pedestrians, thinking about all of the modes. And of course, always prioritizing pedestrians as the most direct and vulnerable and most accessible way of transporting yourself, bicycling and driving and being a transit user as well. We want to make sure that all modes are safe in our city. When you review the plan, you will see that there's a number of strategies and a set of actions under each. I mentioned that we have about 80-some actions in the plan overall. More than 50 of them are in this Safe Streets kind of grouping. And I'm not going to read through through them, I think that would make an extremely boring presentation, even more so than it is already, I'm sorry. But what I will do is I'm going to invite you to please take a look at the actions. And I want to just maybe mention a little bit of something. You know, we group these actions under each of those systems. And there are strategies. And I want to point out that for safe streets, the very first and second set of strategies have to do, first of all, strategy one is how do we reduce or calm vehicle speeds so that they are more compatible with the safety of humans? The safety of humans walking or bicycling or being a passenger or a driver in a motor car. We want speeds to be consistent and safe. And so then we have a number of actions underneath. And the second set of strategies, and you just saw that we had that little red bar there go under high injury streets. You saw earlier how we talked about that map of high injury streets. We want to focus efforts on those high injury streets because we want to be able to get as much safety improvement as we can by directing efforts to those places that are the most dangerous now. It's a way that we can be as efficient as we can with the resources that we have available. Another set of actions that I just want to quickly address. One of the tools that the city of Minneapolis has used over the last several years to address high injury streets and to make improvements has been what we call quick build treatments. And those are, you've seen the bollards around the city. They help to kind of, in a way, constrain some of the traffic spaces so that Cars flow a little bit in a more calm way. They help to make islands where pedestrians can wait as they are crossing and find a gap in traffic, etc. So those have been great. And, you know, the advantage is they can be deployed almost immediately. They're very low cost vehicles. You don't have to have a protracted effort to get something on the street to address those serious injuries and fatalities that are occurring. But they are not permanent. One of the things that we are doing as part of this plan is to really making prioritizing, turning these quick build treatments into permanent treatments. Now that we have had a chance to deploy them and address some of those safety issues, And through research that we conduct and that is also conducted nationally, we have seen that these are effective treatments. Well, now we want to make them permanent. And so that's an action that you will see will be occurring here in Minneapolis over the next four years. And it has already been ongoing, but even more so. So you will see that more in Minneapolis. I'm going to talk now about the next system, which is our safe people, how we encourage safe behavior. And part of that is through education and all of the different efforts that the city does, even separate from Vision Zero, like safe routes to school. There's a lot of overlap, and there's a lot of overlap, too, with our pedestrian and bicycle promotion and so on. But there are also some specific initiatives that relate to how we help create a culture of safety and an awareness of how to be safe while we are walking, bicycling, and particularly driving, as well as we know that motorist speeding is a leading cause of serious injury and fatal crashes. And so here's just a page from the inside of that section of the Vision Zero Action Plan. And I want to focus here on the section related to traffic enforcement. And part of the reason for that is that we know that driver speeding is a very dangerous contributing factor. And so one of the actions that came out of the previous edition of the Vision Zero action plan is the traffic safety camera pilot, which is ongoing now. These traffic safety cameras were launched at the end of 2025. We have five locations that are in the city, and this is one of the ways in which we want to address speeding and to enforce speeding restrictions, speed restrictions in the city without causing disproportionate impacts on some of the very unfortunate interactions that sometimes occur that have discriminatory impact or may have some discriminatory bias in them. And so we want to not have that while still really addressing the behavior of speeding. And so we have these safety cameras that have been deployed in different places in the city, five cameras right now. It's a pilot that was authorized by the state legislature. And it's only been active for just a few months. We did a very initial evaluation covering the first three months that they were deployed. And in those three months, though, we did see pretty significant decreases in speed in speeding in the number of drivers that are traveling more than 10 miles an hour over the speed limit. That decreased by half. And the speeding, 20 miles an hour over the speed limit in a particular location, that decreased even more so. So it's very promising. It's too early. We really, we need... four years of data, at least, to be able to say anything conclusive. But the indications have been very positive so far. And so that is a Vision Zero action that will continue over this term. And we're seeing good results in every single location where they were deployed. there's been consistent decreases. And we'll have new research on that. At the end of the summer, we'll be pulling data again and kind of seeing how that is comparing over time. And after a year, after we have 12 months of data, we'll be able to do that again. And there'll be a report that will come out from this and hopefully will lead to greater use of this system. The next step, we're going to be deploying a camera that not only does it track speeding, issue citations based on that, but also will be able to detect drivers that are running red lights, which is another of those contributing factors to serious injury and fatal crashes. And here are some of the locations that we look in the map that you see on the screen. The locations in orange are the places where the cameras are at right now, and the blue locations are identified locations as high priority future expansion areas if we're able to get additional funding in place to get additional cameras in the city. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the next two systems. We'll start with safe vehicles, and this has to do with the vehicles themselves, with the fleet of vehicles that's in the street. We've done research with the data that we've had available, and in a way, the most efficient place for the city to focus efforts has been simply on its own fleet at this time, though we are paying attention to other issues, other potential issues that we know are problems in other places. So, for example, we pay attention to truck crashes, truck-involved pedestrian and bicycle crashes. In our city, thankfully, the rate of truck-involved pedestrian or bicycle crashes is lower than the state of Minnesota overall at around 2 or 3 percent. We are lower than the state overall and we're actually lower than a lot of other big cities in the in the United States where in some cases they have 30% of fatal or serious injury crashes involve a truck on their streets and so because our percentage is below the state average and I guess we have excellent truck drivers in Minneapolis, which is great. We don't have a specific action for trucks. And also our rate of, because of the way that the permitting for scooters has occurred in our city where we have required speed limitations in particular areas where there are pedestrian concentrations, for example, where the scooter itself through its GPS will limit the speed that somebody can travel on it if they're in those zones with hyperestrogen concentrations, we don't have the same prevalence of injuries that other cities have experienced. So that's been some proactive planning on the part of the city of Minneapolis. So we're focusing in this particular edition simply on the motor vehicle fleets of the city while we're also continuing to pay attention. It's one of the actions that you'll see on the plan, paying attention to truck, scooter, and all of the other different modes that are going to be using the streets of our city. The last component of the four systems is the data component and making sure that we stay as a First of all, the foundation for our actions are data-driven, that we research what's occurring, that we research what are best practices, that we research also what has proven effective and what hasn't proven as effective, and that we invest in Those tools or resource or approaches that are the most effective so that we can deliver good value and actually get to our goal of safety. So, here you can see that page is just a few initiatives, but they're really important initiatives because. First of all, we are talking about continuing to investigate and research methods and making sure that we are gathering the data that will be useful for the future and continuing to monitor progress year after year to see if we are getting results. to where we need to. You will see in here some of those actions about maintaining a repository of where are traffic incidents occurring, making sure that we continue to develop those maps where we can see clusters of injuries. But also there's something that's a really interesting set of proposals here for some of the actions that were going to be taken. In general, the way that a data-driven approach has worked in the past, and even currently, of course, is we learn, we study where crashes have occurred, where somebody has unfortunately been killed or suffered a serious injury, and then we develop a response to that. Something that I'm really excited about is that You know, there are ways now because of the different technologies that are deployed and people's cell phones, in cars and in different apps that sometimes are required by insurance companies, that we can actually aggregate, working with different vendors who aggregate all of this data and can tell us locations where, for example, there is a greater number of motor vehicles that are suddenly decelerating over time. or that places where people are swerving to avoid a potential collision. And as these layers of information continue to build on top of each other, we can then, without actually having had a crash or an injury or a fatality occur in a place, we can begin to pick out places where there are some conditions that maybe we can address before any of that happens. And so that's kind of a proactive model of safety where before we've been reacting to crashes, and of course we will continue to do that, but we're also investigating how we can respond to avoid any crashes from occurring there or from any additional crashes occurring in a place. So those are some of the avenues, frontiers of where the plan is hoping to head as well. And maybe I'm going to ask Victoria if there are any questions that have come in so far that have a little bit to do with the systems, safe streets or data before we go through the next and final part of our time together.

One question that I think is at least partially answered, but I'll call attention to is a participant wants to know the timeline for expanding the traffic camera pilot to a lot more intersections in the city. And is this something that still requires state approval?

Well, that's a great question. And so the timeline at this point, you know, part of it is a funding issue. The state legislature authorized as part of this pilot up to 42 locations in the city and So we could deploy 42 cameras, but at this moment right now, you know, we are unsure of how we would pay for that. So it's something that is being investigated right now because just even preliminarily, we are finding good results, very promising results. So we would like to expand that. We are authorized to be able to expand that by the legislature. But I think it'll depend on kind of what that funding picture is like. So great question. And I think, you know, we'll be having a couple of additional reports coming out. So if you are on the Vision Zero mailing list, which is how I believe you may have received it, if you are in the Vision Zero mailing list, or in the pedestrian issues mailing list, or in the bicycling issues mailing list that the city of Minneapolis maintains. When the next reports for the traffic safety camera pilot come out, we'll be sending those out so that you can review them. And it's going to be a few months yet until we have those. But yeah, thank you. That's a great question. All right. Oh, go ahead.

Sorry, we also have a question about funding if we want to answer that now it says, are we investing enough in these programs given the very real human cost being incurred in our city? How much more money could we be putting towards vision? 0 to accelerate our progress to achieving our goal of 0 fatalities.

Well, you know, that's a, that's a very important question and, um. There are some funding complications and funding realities, right, that we can't, I mean, it's something that I might, you know, in our department, in our group working on these issues, that's not in a way up to us. And the city has, it's a complex operation providing a lot of services. that are essential to keep the city running. I think everybody at the city is trying to address this as a priority as much as they can. And, you know, I'll give you some great news. We are, you know, we have actually, we're selected, we won a grant, Safe Streets for All, that back in 2023, the money has gone through different complications at the federal level, but we should be receiving about $20 million from the federal government, $5 million from the state handling another federal grant. And those $25 million are coming to help address intersections and streets and high injury streets and all of those issues. And, you know, it hasn't come in yet, so we don't quite want to count our chickens before they are hatched, but we hear it's coming soon. And so we are right now doing work to get ready to be able to execute these plans. And as part of annual work, you will find what we have been able to do. And we'll have some figures related to, well, what is the need and how much are we actually able to accomplish with what we have. But that's a great question. And it's always attention, right? But I think we're headed in the right direction. Thank you. All right. And that's a great segue to this next part here, because I want to talk about some of the things that Vision Zero as an initiative of the city of Minneapolis has been able to do here over the last few years. And this is, you know, starting at some of these started in 2020, 2021. Some are more recent initiatives, but just to share with you, we've built more than 250 intersection improvements with the quick build treatments, which we are now going to be moving into permanent treatments. More than 30 miles of four-lane to three-lane conversions that have a demonstrated effect on improving safety. And these have been focused on high injury streets. Because again, that's, you know, the purpose of that map is to help steer our investments in the most effective places. More than almost 90 traffic calming projects since 2023. And we have been continuing every single year. We have several that are a week away from starting. already in several places. The 20 is Plenty campaign, which was done jointly with the City of St. Paul since 2020 and has been a great success. There's an evaluation going on to actually ascertain what the total cumulative effect of that has been on safety. This is the grant that I mentioned earlier. proactive safety treatments on 25 miles of high injury streets in the city of Minneapolis. We haven't received any of the money yet. It was awarded in late 2023. We have a $5 million grant from the state of Minnesota, so $25 million total. And the efforts of the city of Minneapolis have been recognized nationally as well. Just last year, in the high injury network. More than 25 intersections have been addressed, curve extensions, hardened center lines, which are treatments right at the corners in the travel lanes, in between travel lanes at intersections, to reduce the speed of turning vehicles. Because we know that drivers failing to yield or turning too fast is a significant cause. To sum up, the plan, the draft plan is available for your review at the Vision Zero website. Go to Google, type in Minneapolis Vision Zero and it'll come right up and you will be able to see the plan and download it and there is a place to comment right in there. Please send your comments in. We have, it's a 30-day public comment period. We had an in-person public meeting yesterday. We've been presenting to the different pedestrian and bicycle committees of the city and the committee of people with disabilities as well. That's coming up in July. Once the public comment period ends, we are hoping to address all of the comments that we receive and then be presenting to the City Council tentatively on August 6th. When you review the plan, please provide your comments on what you see in the plan, but then also if there are actions or ideas that you don't see and that you wish we would be thinking about. please add them there as well because that'll help us as well make sure that we're covering all of the options for potential treatments, potential issues, and we can enrich the plan that we then present to the city. And with that, I think that's the end of the presentation. We have time for more questions if you don't mind staying on for a minute or two more, or actually more than, we'll stay as long as you wish to send us questions. And yeah, thank you for being with us here tonight. We appreciate your time and your company. And yeah, thank you. Victoria, do we have any other questions that have come in that we can address now?

Yes, we have a few. The first one is confirming where this presentation and when it will be shared.

OK, so at the same Vision Zero site, Minneapolis Vision Zero, it'll come up. This video, this presentation is being recorded and you'll be able to download it right there. We'll also post a PDF of the presentation so that you can download it and

know scroll through it uh at your leisure so same place minneapolis vision zero all right next question asks how are you tracking the inequity and ada impacts of mndot's fencing off sidewalks at bridge underpasses in minneapolis these areas are disproportionately located in the native american community development zones and remove accessible paths of travel and community What solutions can Vision Zero help identify and implement for these locations? They also shared a recent Instagram post from someone who a person living with a disability using a mobility aid was a hit and run.

We are aware of that issue, and it's something that actually I'm scheduled to go either today or tomorrow to go and document, take a and observe as well. It's certainly something that the city has been in contact with MnDOT over time to try to address. Not providing a place for people to safely walk is not a good thing to do. And it's contrary to the goals of having safe places for people to transit and to access. It's also important to make sure that we don't exacerbate inequities. And it's also important that we address issues as quickly as they arise. So that It has not been a city of Minneapolis choice, but Minneapolis works with other state and county partners to address conditions on roadways that are in Minneapolis, but are not owned by Minneapolis. And so we'll continue to work with partners to address these issues as quickly as can be done. It's a very important issue. Yes. And it shouldn't be that people don't have a safe place to walk. That is not consistent with Vision Zero.

Thank you for that question, too.

The next question asks, do we think autonomous vehicles like Tesla, Autopilot, Waymo, et cetera, will support or reverse our Vision Zero goals?

You know, we are... Not quite sure yet. And that's something that, you know, it's been brought up as something to look at and try to understand. There's not a lot of data available. know there's a selection of data that gets presented by advocates for autonomous you know or or marketing people for and and there are other data that show the opposite sometimes and there's of course uh very uh high visibility instances where crashes fatal crashes have occurred as well so um We're going to look at the data and we're going to make recommendations based on that. So, but, yeah, that's, uh, it's an important issue and it's, it's showing up. I mean, it's something that is, um, it's part of the conversation nationally.

So, thank you.

The next question asks, given that we gave this plan and others that guide staff for street designs, why do we have to approve each project individually? why can't staff implement the guidance they have and get to work without drawing all this out with constant public meetings, comment periods, et cetera?

Well, that's a great question, a valid question, of course. There's always a give and take or a tension between having too much communication or too little communication, right? And I think if we're going to err or make an error on one side, I think it's, you know, the same as with relationships and friendships that we have in our own lives. You know, is it better to communicate too little or better to communicate maybe too much. I would prefer to err on the side of communicating too much because that gives ample opportunity for everyone who may have a different opinion to come out and say their piece and to participate in this debate of ideas to get to a better solution. I think that part of what makes Minneapolis Minneapolis is this value, this commitment to listening to other perspectives and to making sure that as part of respecting each other, that we give ample opportunity for other ideas to come. And yes, sometimes it would be, you know, it's very, the idea is very attractive to be able to do things more quickly. And the truth is that we are not re-legislating or re-asking the same questions over and over again. What we're doing is we're trying to be really thoughtful about how do we make sure that we hear the experiences of the different populations that make Minneapolis their home and that the plans that we make and the things that we build are actually good things for everybody. Because that's what we're trying to do. Make a city that gets better every day and it's better for everyone. And we don't have all the answers and we need to ask. And I think that that can get us to a good place. But I can also understand why we would have this sense of impatience about let's just do it. But I think we can do both. So any other questions?

The last question currently in the chat is, does the revenue from the traffic camera pilot go to the general fund or to the Vision Zero program?

Oh, that's a great question, because I am going to say that I don't, I'm not the person that runs the program or who set it up. So I don't have all of that information, but I do know a couple of things that I can share with you about it. So, you know, we'll provide some additional information at the website so you can get the actual answer. But my understanding is that. the program, the way that the, that defines and kind of the defining structure is that it's not a revenue generator. It just is intended to pay for itself, you know, because it costs money to deploy the cameras. You know, there's a, an equipment cost, but there's an, also an equal cost in terms of, you know, the actual monitoring and of the, human agents who, once a violation is detected, have to review the video to ascertain, yes, a violation was detected. And then... And those costs are... The fine structure is intended to pay for those costs only and not to generate, you know, any profit or any revenue for the city or for anyone else. So... But that's a great question. We'll provide information on that at the same place where you will find the video. And within a week, this should be available. So any other questions, Victoria?

Yes, one was added that asks, how are you prioritizing safe school routes and bike path intersections?

Well,

I would say we're prioritizing both. Safe routes to school, right? That's one of the components. That's an important priority. That is not exactly a Vision Zero initiative. It's another initiative within the city and within our pedestrian and bicycle effort as well. But as part of Vision Zero, we want to make very, very sure that we have safe conditions around those areas. And so there's an interconnection in those efforts. And safe intersections for bikeways you know, when I showed you a little bit earlier, the map of high injury streets, I don't know if you noticed there, and maybe I should have pointed it out with a little more emphasis. There's also high injury intersections noted. So these are intersections where a larger proportion of of crashes and injuries have occurred or are occurring. And so we are dedicating efforts. Vision Zero focuses efforts on these kind of most critical, more critical locations within the city. And there are other efforts that the city of Minneapolis in its transportation planning program and public works are responsible for, like the neighborhood traffic calming which is not directly a Vision Zero initiative because those streets are neighborhood streets that are not on the high-injury streets. But we also know that we want to count traffic speeds there to be safe. And as part of our bikeways, not necessarily through Vision Zero, but we always want to make sure that we have the most up-to-date based on research way of addressing intersections, because that's a critical part of the path for, you know, for pedestrians, for bicyclists, for motorists. So it's all part of a lot of interesting and very thoughtful efforts that are happening here within our office. And, you know, just a day or two ago, for example, that we had kind of an internal discussion on, you know, how are intersections handled and you know what is our current practice and how are ways in which you can make it even better learning from what has been built and experiences that we've had in observation and use of these places great question uh anything else victoria any more yes all right the newest question says can you expand on when and how the plan will work on targeting

multi-jurisdictional high incident areas?

Well, that is something that is an ongoing effort. And thank you for asking that question, because that's a really, you know, we talk about high injury streets, we talk about Vision Zero in Minneapolis, and a lot of We really can only make changes on the streets that Minneapolis owns in the city. It's kind of a funny thing, but oftentimes as regular residents of our community, we might not think of a street as the property of one entity and not the other, but that is how it works. And there are streets in Minneapolis that are owned by Hennepin County. There are streets and roadways in Minneapolis that are owned by MnDOT. And the majority of streets and roadways are owned by the city. And coordinating with Hennepin County, for example, can lead to really important improvements in streets that are really kind of iconic streets in our city, like, for example, Lake Street. That's a Hennepin County road where there's been a lot of cooperation with the county and relationships that have been built over time as well. Their University Avenue by the University of Minnesota, for example, that's if you're familiar with how things used to be, you know, maybe ten years ago versus how they are today. there, that was a very successful collaboration with Hennepin County. And there's, you know, additionally, or similarly, you know, there's work that is ongoing today with Central Avenue, which is a state highway, to provide really, you know, in the next iteration of Central Avenue, you know, the plans that are being made now, really amazing uh bicycle and pedestrian facilities that were not um were not possible uh you know 10 years ago but all of that has grown up out of collaboration and so um i would say those conversations continue on a kind of a global scale with the departments of transportation of Hennepin County and, you know, within MnDOT and their pedestrian and bicycle and towards zero deaths groups, but also have to happen on a project by project basis. And one of the, I think one of the ways in which the people of Minneapolis can feel proud of their public works staff is by knowing that at every single project that's happening, even if it's not on a road that the city owns, city staff are present and participating and advocating for safer pedestrian, bicycle, and motorist connections. but particularly for pedestrians and bicyclists. And that where there are places where this connects and where there are current issues, like we just talked about the Franklin Cedar area, there are efforts and relationships that we are drawing on and really trying to make improvements with as much vigor as we can while working through those channels and relationships that have taken a long time to establish and that have yielded a lot of positive results for the city in different places. It's a complicated thing, but institutions are also not homogeneous, right? So there's differences and different ways to address different issues. But we do participate vigorously and advocate vigorously for the people of Minneapolis and for the safety and well-being of our population. So I like that question. Thank you for asking that. Any other questions?

A participant would like to know, would changing timing of lights and multifunctional routes, like on Broadway Avenue Northeast, be in the scope of Vision Zero?

Yes. Yes. One of the actions that's included in the plan, and I want to take this opportunity to invite you all again to download the plan and read through some of those actions and send your comments in. But some of those actions have to do with reviewing timing and thinking about other signal systems, for example, timing signal systems. And we have a, this Vision Zero plan is also a document. So it's a document for the city, right? But the city has different divisions, you know, where we, how we maintain roads and streets, how we organize and manage our signals and our signal timing. All of the different departments of the city participate in putting the plan together. And what's in the plan is actually what each of these departments then follows as its actions. And so, yes, we consider that, and that is one of the actions that you'll see in the plan. Any more questions come in?

That's all the questions.

Oh my goodness. So we answered all the questions. That's very good. I'm sure people will come up with new questions. If you come up with a new question, please use our survey on the website and send it to us and we'll provide a document with answers to some of these questions as well that came in in the website. So thank you all. I think If there are no more questions, I think that we might end our presentation. Is that true, Victoria and Roman? Yeah, okay. I'm getting a lot of yeses. Okay, so then I am going to say thank you all very much for joining us tonight. We enjoyed having this opportunity to share the draft Vision Zero plan with you. We look forward to staying in touch. Please come to the website and download the plan, make your comments, and yeah, we'll be in contact with you again soon. Thank you very much. Good night. Bye-bye.