Photo: Samantha Fortney on Unsplash

State of emergency sees road collisions fall in Carlsbad

20 April 2023

by Sarah Wray

In August 2022, the City of Carlsbad, CA declared a road safety state of emergency.

Earlier in the month, the death of a 35-year-old mother who was struck by a vehicle as she and her toddler rode an electric bike shook the local community.

The city said there had been a 233 percent increase in collisions involving bikes and e-bikes since 2019, and the declaration aimed to immediately increase attention and resources on halting this trend.

At the recent Cities Today Institute City Leadership Forum in Las Vegas, Carlsbad’s Chief Innovation Officer David Graham told Cities Today about the results of the interventions so far, which were recently presented to the council.

[Watch the interview with David Graham]

He said the outcome was “absolutely shocking”.

A five-year data analysis showed that in the fourth quarter of the year, there is always an uptick in road collisions, due to factors such as the return to school, more traffic on the roads and weather.

Based on these patterns, Carlsbad expected to see a 20 percent increase in injury collisions in the fourth quarter of 2022. Instead, there was a 20 percent fall, meaning a 40 percent decrease on where they expected to be.

“This is something that has not happened, ever, in the five years of data that we analysed,” Graham said.

Data also showed that injury collisions across all modes of travel were down by 19 percent during the first six months of the emergency, compared to the same time the previous year. Injury collisions related to bikes and e-bikes fell 13 percent.

“On all measures, this fast intervention, declaration of emergency, pooling resources to have immediate change and then setting the plan for the long-term transformation is really leading to safer streets in Carlsbad,” said Graham. “Fewer injuries, fewer deaths, and putting us on a transportation future that everyone in the community can buy into.”

Education, engineering, enforcement

The strategy to achieve these results focused on three pillars: education, engineering and enforcement.

Measures introduced include encouraging residents to take a safer streets pledge. Staff have distributed over 5,000 materials such as stickers, carried out education campaigns in schools, and used social media and public sentiment insights to “really move the needle on people being a part of this community of safety”.

“Safer streets are everyone’s responsibility,” said Graham. “Whether you’re walking, driving, riding your bicycle; we’re all a part of creating that safer street.”

Physical changes include high-visibility crosswalks, green lanes for bikeways, and installing barriers to protect bike and pedestrian lanes.

Graham said: “The engineering approach to making it more difficult to end up having a collision and especially one that leads to an injury or fatality are part of our both near-term and long-term plans.”

On enforcement, Graham commented: “It’s not just about writing people tickets and getting them to pay them. We actually created a diversion programme so that if you are cited for an incident – and we targeted and looked at our enforcement around heatspots and heatmaps that we created on the data side – you would have the opportunity to go take a class and avoid paying that ticket, bringing you into the community of support to create those safer streets for all.”

Investing in the invisible

The city has turned the innovation approach it has used elsewhere to the road safety push, Graham says, and data is key to this.

The team looked at injury collision data and created heatmaps to understand the most dangerous intersections using a five-year analysis, as well as setting up tracking for the future.

“Fortunately, this city council and manager have invested in an innovation team, in data governance and a city-wide data policy – the systems and the practices across our city that collect and ensure good quality data and that the information can be shared,” he commented.

“What we see through this particular example is investing in the unseen is creating transformation in the things people can see. So we’ll continue to invest in that, invest in those systems and apply it across multiple different challenges – hopefully not always in just an emergency.”

Maintaining momentum

On road safety, the city noted in a statement that while the results are encouraging, six months is a short amount of time when it comes to analysing data for trends or lasting change. In late March, the council decided to extend the emergency for another 60 days until the next review, and the city also adopted a formal Vision Zero resolution.

Graham says the city is creating a long-term plan as well as making near-term investments.

“I think we’ll end up seeing that ultimately, this point in time, the systems and structures we’ve created, the approach to community change and behaviour, is going to stick and going to last.

“And we’re going to continue to prioritise our residents, our visitors, our businesses, our children and their safety. And that’s going to be something that forever will change in Carlsbad.”

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