Behind the Curtain of Street Safety Planning

As the Watch For Me OK team strategizes about how to make the streets safer for all roadway users, there are several key concepts behind traffic safety that guide our decision-making. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at those concepts, exploring why they are critical to preventing collisions, injuries, and fatalities and how they shape the work we do to protect all street users. Central Oklahoma streets are for everyone, and so they must be designed with the safety of all users in mind. 

Vision Zero

Cities across the country are rethinking how they design streets, with a shared goal of bringing traffic deaths down to zero. After a rise in traffic fatalities in the early 2020s, with high speeds and low visibility standing out as recurring factors, several cities across Central Oklahoma have adopted a plan to address it, called Vision Zero.

Vision Zero’s goal is to completely eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries entirely, not just reduce them. The idea started in Sweden in the 1990s and has since spread to cities across the US, including Oklahoma City and Edmond. When cities adopt transportation safety plans like Vision Zero, new federal funding streams emerge, such as the $25 million grant Oklahoma City received in 2026.  

The philosophy behind Vision Zero is simple: people are human, and they make mistakes, so we must make streets safe and forgiving of those mistakes. Instead of only attributing collisions to driver errors, Vision Zero recognizes that street design is the most important factor in making streets safe. 

The Safe Systems Approach

You’ll sometimes hear Vision Zero paired with another phrase, the Safe Systems Approach, which the US Department of Transportation formally adopted in 2022. This approach can be thought of as a list of common-sense assumptions: humans mess up sometimes, human bodies can only survive so much force in a collision, and safety fixes should happen before someone dies, not after.

From there, cities that adopt this approach look at infrastructure changes like speed bumps, better street lighting, narrower lanes that naturally slow drivers down, and protected space for pedestrians. These changes build multiple layers of protection to reduce the harm of collisions and work to prevent collisions before they happen. While these things may seem miniscule, they quietly do a lot of work. 

Strong Towns

A nonprofit called Strong Towns has developed a framework for this kind of work, called the Crash Analysis Studio. Instead of investigating a collision to determine the user errors that contribute fault, the studio model asks a different question: what about this street made the collision more likely to happen and how do we fix that? 

Many Central Oklahoma communities have already identified high speeds and poor lighting as the biggest factors behind traffic deaths, which lines up with what other cities have found when they’ve looked into their own crash data. By adopting the Crash Analysis Studio model, towns and cities can better identify fixes that will save residents’ lives.  

What this looks like locally

OKC’s Vision Zero plan identifies the city’s most dangerous corridors and recommends changes aimed at the same root causes: high speeds and low visibility. Infrastructure changes that reduce vehicle speeds and enhance visibility drastically improve our collision rates and make a significant impact on the safety of our streets. 

The Association of Central Oklahoma Governments also has a role to play. As a part of our Watch For Me OK campaign, we are rolling out a new resource for our member communities called Street Pop! to help construct quick-build and placemaking demonstration projects throughout the region. The goal is to support communities that want to test drive new safety features (crosswalk striping, barriers for bike lanes, visual features that narrow the street to reduce speed, etc.) without major expense.

Why Safety Matters

A safe or dangerous street affects the choices we make every day. A safer street can make it possible for an elementary student to walk to school, it can give you the comfort and security to bike to your neighborhood coffee shop, and a safer street can reduce serious and fatal collisions. The cities committed to Safe Systems and Vision Zero approaches prove that small changes in street design have a significant impact in reducing serious and fatal collisions. 

Understanding Vision Zero and the Safe Systems approach is just the beginning. Saving lives is not expensive, and action can be taken quickly. Through the Street Pop! Program, we can make our communities safer right now. Instead of waiting on multi-year, sometimes multi-decade safety projects to get funded, cities can make dangerous streets safer right now with tools as simple as paint and traffic cones.