Hi, I'm Will Washam, and I'm the Bicycle Program Coordinator for the City of Charlotte's Department of Transportation. I'm going to share the Charlotte Department of Transportation or CDOT's work to advance the city's Vision Zero pledge made in 2018.

These are all of the crashes that occurred in the city of Charlotte from 2015 to 2019. Visualizing the data in this manner makes it difficult to identify the places where the most serious and even fatal crashes are occurring. This map shows the crashes within that same time frame that resulted in deaths and serious injuries. 733 fatal and serious injury crashes occurred between 2015 and 2019. Fatal traffic crashes accounted for 307 of the 733 crashes shown on your screen.

To better identify streets where fatal and serious injury crashes occur, we mapped a High Injury Network or HIN. The HIN makes up just 9 percent of the total street network. 64 percent on thoroughfares, 15 percent on collectors and 21 percent on local streets. After the HIN was completed, our traffic safety unit began public input to develop Charlotte's Vision Zero Action Plan. The public was able to add comments to an online map highlighting safety issues on the streets in their neighborhoods. This gave us a sense of common problems across the city such as cars not yielding for pedestrians and speeding.

During the development of the Charlotte Vision Zero Action Plan, we conducted extensive community engagement. Community engagement included over 25 community events, over 2,000 conversations about traffic safety and over 1,600 comments on an interactive map. Charlotte's Vision Zero Action Plan relies on a collaborative approach that focused on equity and engagement to complement the in-depth analysis of fatal and serious injury crash data. The development process took place over seven months and in January of 2019, the action plan was finalized.

The stakeholder steering committee for the Vision Zero Action Plan represents a wide range of organizations including law enforcement, transit agencies, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, local hospital systems and many more. We use the HIN to identify locations for pedestrian, bike and other safety improvements. Once improvements are identified, they may be funded by any number of capital improvement programs. 22 improved pedestrian crossings were installed in 2021 alone.

We've also used the HIN to identify corridors where enforcement can be focused to help address the goals of Vision Zero. This allows the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department or CMPD to focus their patrols in areas where they will have the highest impact on reducing speeding and dangerous driving behaviors. Oftentimes, engineering solutions to reducing speed on a HIN corridor involve reducing the number of motor vehicle lanes. 6th street through Uptown Charlotte was on the original High Injury Network and now has a two-way cycle track in place of the third motor vehicle lane.

The HIN has been used to identify priority locations for upgrading street lights to LEDs from high-pressure sodium lamps. 51 street segments along the HIN are currently being programmed for street lighting upgrades. 25 schools were identified in the Vision Zero Action Plan as fronting streets along the High Injury Network. In 2021, CDOT completed a Safe Routes to School Plan with recommendations for safety improvements at five of those schools. The identified projects are included in the city's various capital improvement programs. For funding, Charlotte has many four-lane arterials with long distances between crossing opportunities for pedestrians. Vision Zero is providing a renewed focus on identifying engineering solutions to improve these corridors for our most vulnerable street users.

Five corridor studies are underway to provide guidance for future pedestrian safety improvements. Leading Pedestrian Intervals or LPIs are allowing pedestrians to begin crossing an intersection before vehicle traffic providing greater visibility for our vulnerable street users. LPIs are not new to Charlotte, but we've doubled down on their implementation by installing LPIs at 31 new intersections in 2021. In our quest for Vision Zero by 2030, CDOT is encouraging new design philosophies and construction techniques. This includes pilot projects for intersection safety such as slow turn wedges for motor vehicles at intersections.

Using the High Injury Network data, CMPD conducted 50 traffic safety enforcement events in 2021. These enforcement events targeted unsafe driving conditions on corridors with a history of bicycle and pedestrian traffic crashes. CDOT has recently begun using a new application to house our geo-located crash data. Staff from CDOT and CMPD can use this analysis tool to identify crash trends in their respective parts of the city. These new tools continue to improve our Vision Zero efforts.

CDOT's capital improvement programs now use the High Injury Network in all project prioritization processes. This prioritizes delivering multimodal projects which directly improve safety conditions on our streets. These programs include the Pedestrian Program, the Bicycle Program and the Street Lighting Program.

Vision Zero has galvanized a myriad of partner agencies in Charlotte around a community-wide goal of reducing the number of fatalities on our streets to zero. CDOT will continue to lead our community towards this goal and we're excited to be a part of the growing network of Vision Zero Communities in North Carolina. For more information, visit charlottenc.gov/VisionZero. You can also email CLTVisionZero@charlottenc.gov with your questions.