Safety projects on dangerous Sacramento roads could be fast-tracked if City Council approves
A Sacramento City Council committee will vote Tuesday on whether to shift funds toward a “quick-build” program that would fast-track targeted road safety projects on dangerous roads.
The Department of Public Works will make the proposal at the council’s Budget and Audit committee meeting.
A quick-build program could help curb the city’s high traffic death toll through targeted interventions designed and built within a year. Currently, road safety projects often stall for years or decades.
Citing the city’s high traffic death rate, Councilmember Caity Maple said that this type of program is critical as an interim measure.
“Most of what we have historically done ... has been focused around the long-term projects, right? The transformative projects,” she said. The city will continue such work, but still, “We can’t really afford to wait.”
Because the department is not asking for new money, Maple said, if the budget committee and the full City Council both approve the plan, the department could begin staffing a tactical urbanism team this spring.
Under the proposal, six full-time-equivalent staffers would be focused solely on relatively fast and inexpensive safety improvements to city streets.
A project in the quick-build mold made the intersection of Broadway and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard safer after a series of people drove their cars into a senior apartment complex on the corner. Those tweaks cost just $60,000.
New program could prevent injuries, deaths
The vast majority of traffic deaths are preventable with changes to infrastructure, which is why the City Council made a “Vision Zero” pledge in 2017 to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries by 2027. In the years since the council set this ambitious goal, more than 300 people have died, and the city had not established a mechanism for making relatively rapid changes to infrastructure, even in the wake of fatal crashes.
Since January 2024, at least 35 people have died in crashes on city streets: Mattie Nicholson, 56; Kate Johnston, 55; Jeffrey Blain, 59; Aaron Ward, 40; Michael J. Kennedy, 40; Federico Zacarias Cambrano, 28; Marvin Moran, 22; Sam Dent, 41; Daniel Morris, 38; Terry Lane, 55; David Rink, 51; James Lind, 54; Tyler Vandehei, 32; Jose Valladolid Ramirez, 36; Larry Winters, 76; Sau Voong, 84; Johnnie A. Fite, 82; Robert Kohler Jr., 50; Edward J. Lopez, 61; David D. Taylor, 60; José Luis Silva, 55; Geohaira “Geo” Sosa, 32; Kaylee Xiong, 18; Muhammad Saddique, 64; Azure Amonti Daniels, 48; Duane Ashby, 35; Martin Chavez, 41; Daniel Lee Jennings Jr., 54; Jordan Nicolas Rodriguez, 38; Alfred Ramirez, 23; Nelson Lee, 64; and Lindie Kraushar, 53.
On Jan. 31, Najah Islam became one of the first people to die on a Sacramento street this year. She was a passenger in a single-vehicle crash in Gateway West near North Natomas.
Islam was 30. Among her survivors is her daughter — a toddler.
Since Islam’s death, two pedestrians have died in collisions. Jonathon T. Slaugh, 62, was killed Feb. 13 on Roseville Road. The second pedestrian, whose name has not yet been released by the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office, was killed in a hit-and-run Wednesday in the River District.
Of the 35 killed, 22 were pedestrians or cyclists, and two were on electric scooters.
Separate from the quick-build program, the city will soon consider whether to declare a state of emergency over dangers to pedestrians and cyclists. Maple emphasized that the quick-build program would not replace other efforts — including long-term projects and the emergency resolution — to make city streets safer.
“This is an issue in our city,” she said, “that needs to be addressed urgently.”
Concerns about federal grants for traffic safety in Trump era
Typically, transportation projects in California’s capital, along with other municipalities, have relied heavily on both state and federal grants. The grants have made large-scale, expensive projects such as the changes underway on Broadway possible. A reliance on grants has also dramatically slowed the timeline for many street overhauls, which need separate competitive grants — which are never guaranteed — for each major stage of development.
But local officials are now concerned that even that flawed and unreliable source of money could disappear. During President Donald Trump’s second term, the White House has pursued vast cuts to government spending already authorized by Congress.
That unpredictability at the federal level makes the quick-build program even more important, Maple said.
“As we see what’s happening with the federal government, there’s a lot of concern that we may not even have access to some of the grants that we historically have,” Maple said. “And so we have to pivot as well and say, ‘What can we do quickly while we continue to try and get these resources from the state and federal governments?’”
This story was originally published February 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
