Working with Bike Jeffco on shared topics has been a pleasure. It’s also been great to interact more with Jefferson County Parks and Open Space, they’re doing great work. They have a phrase that makes me laugh, “the Boulders.” They use it to refer to the City of Boulder and Boulder County both at once. It’s funny because around the state, the Boulders are admired and ridiculed simultaneously.
This past week I attended a Denver Regional Council of Governments meeting. CDOT presented a year-end safety update. Excess deaths and injuries continue to be the norm.
The context here is that the U.S. is worst by a margin among peer nations for safety outcomes.
Serious injuries are the same story and a matter of luck divides them from fatalities.
Vulnerable road users, ones not in autos, are especially hard hit.
Autos are safer and safer for their passengers while people around them are worse off.
At the end of the meeting, two things happened. One attendee, a traffic professional, asked, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘what do we do? We work so hard describing the problem and the seriously injured and fatalities keep on happening.’ Boulder County asked if there was news on the grant funding it’s seeking from the federal government that is delivered through DRCOG for Vision Zero safety based interventions where the crash data indicates the need to fix safety problems.
Here we go again with the Boulders when we could be working together. We know what to do, we’ve described it for decades, and only a government that is supported is capable of changing. All these governments deserve to be supported in their work. Design determines outcomes and Boulder County is executing on interventions and executing on design-standards that prevent killed and seriously injured in the first place.
Later this past week, I watched a presentation by a City of Boulder traffic engineer who won a grant to visit Australia. The bicycling advocacy world makes Europe into an ideal where safety is so much better. Europe also has a different land-use pattern from the U.S. On the other hand, Australia has a land-use pattern like the U.S.
The U.S. is worst among peer nations for traffic related killed and seriously injured. Australia is near the best and that’s due to infrastructure design-standards and policy. If the entire nation of Australia can do it, I think Colorado can do it. Safety can extend to everyone, not just the Boulders.
If you wonder what C4C is doing about all this, it’s been working with Bike Jeffco and others to adapt and scale the design on the Highway 119 The Diagonal Boulder – Longmont Project to, for example, Highway 93 Golden – Boulder. It’s a proven design that delivers mobility, safety, and comfort for all.
Thanks for supporting C4C.
Matt Muir, C4C Policy Director