Dangerous Sacramento roads could get safer after council members OK new program
Sacramento’s Budget and Audit Committee unanimously approved a new road safety program Tuesday that would rapidly design and construct low-cost infrastructure projects — a significant shift in a city with a high rate of traffic deaths.
In 2017, the City Council made a “Vision Zero” pledge to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries by 2027, but the death toll has continued to rise. A quick-build safety program in the Department of Public Works would be the first formal mechanism to allow a streamlined design and construction process for certain low-cost road interventions. The Vision Zero plan has thus far focused on transformative large-scale projects that take years — even decades — to finish.
Megan Carter, the Public Works transportation division manager and city traffic engineer, told the committee, “This program represents a critical step in achieving Sacramento’s Vision Zero goals.” With quick-builds, she said, projects could take “months rather than years.”
Isaac Gonzalez, vice chair of the city’s Active Transportation Commission and the founder of Slow Down Sacramento, said the proposal “represents what I believe could be a fundamental shift in how Sacramento approaches infrastructure improvements.”
Councilmember Caity Maple, who sits on the budget committee and pushed for such a program, lauded Public Works staff for coming up with the program while emphasizing that the city’s work wasn’t done.
“This a great first step,” Maple said. “We still have a lot of other work to do. ... We’re gonna continue to fight for that.”
In the fall, Maple started the process for the council to consider declaring a state of emergency over cyclist and pedestrian deaths. Since January 2024, 22 pedestrians and cyclists have been killed in collisions, along with two electric scooter riders.
The committee voted to approve the quick-build program at the same time that it forwarded the Active Transportation Commission’s annual report to the full City Council. The commission has made six recommendations to the council, asking for a total of $8.1 million in the next budget cycle for efforts that would make Sacramento more hospitable to pedestrians and cyclists.
The Department of Public Works has not asked for any new funding for the quick-build program. That, Maple previously said, means that if the program is approved by the full City Council, the department could start hiring this spring ahead of the July 1 budget start.
How would a quick-build program work?
Carter explained Tuesday that the city’s Public Works would hire six new staff for the program, including a supervising engineer, lower-level engineers and administrative staff. She pointed to the proposed state of emergency when she said the six staff were needed “to address the immediate concerns, immediate needs of traffic safety and traffic fatalities in our community.”
“We also want this program to be catered to and dictated by the deeper needs of the community,” she said. They would not choose which projects to pursue simply based on crash data, she said. They plan to use resident input on which parts of the city’s roads would be good candidates for improvement.
In addition to hiring new staff and establishing a new process for designing and constructing projects, the department would be transparent, Carter said. Staff would create an online “dashboard” so that residents could see exactly which projects were underway and track progress.
The new city workers would focus most of their time on targeted road safety interventions. They would also work on low-cost interim installations on roads with slow-moving, large-scale projects in the works.
Currently, infrastructure projects require multiple rounds of unreliable state and federal grant funding — and multiple rounds of unpredictable grant application cycles — before ever reaching the construction phase. That reliance on grants dramatically slows the timeline for improvements to roads, even after fatal crashes. In the eight years since the council made its Vision Zero pledge, budget documents show that the council has not significantly changed the way it funds Public Works projects.
This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
