$75M for Sacramento street safety? New sales tax headed toward November ballots
A proposed citizen’s ballot measure that would direct a half-cent sales tax increase toward safer streets in Sacramento is poised for a vote in the November election after organizers submitted 32,000 signatures to the City Clerk’s Office Tuesday morning.
The city and county must complete reviews of the signatures before the measure officially gets on the ballot. Sam Rice, a resident who helped rally voters to get the measure in front of voters in November, said that while officials still have to verify and count the signatures, the advocates’ count was 3,000 higher than the threshold to qualify.
Rice and his co-organizers estimated that the Safer Sac Streets Measure could generate $75 million a year. About half the money would be reserved for transit projects in the city, while half would go toward fixing surface streets.
Members of the Sacramento City Council have pinned high hopes on this potential new funding mechanism. Almost 10 years after making a “Vision Zero” pledge to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2027, the council has not directed significant general funds toward that effort. During that decade of strapped planning and construction budgets, many safety projects stalled as city staff applied for — and often didn’t win — competitive grants through the Department of Public Works.
Since the council set that goal in 2017, the death toll has continued to rise. So far this year, crashes have killed at least 26 people.
What does this mean for Sacramento?
An injection of money for the Department of Public Works could be transformative, elected officials said.
Mayor Kevin McCarty, as well as council members Rick Jennings, Roger Dickinson and Caity Maple (who has championed Vision Zero and who is married to Rice), have previously indicated that they see the measure as a solution to addressing dangerous roads while navigating money troubles at the city. In past deficit and surplus years alike, the council has declined to direct general fund dollars toward achieving their ambitious goal of eliminating traffic deaths. Prior Sacramento Bee reporting has shown that after setting the Vision Zero goal, the council has made no substantive changes to the way infrastructure projects are funded in the city.
Last year, the City Council redirected $4.6 million in existing funds to a “quick-build” team that would focus on lower-cost safety projects that can be installed without the years-long delays of projects that call for higher-cost construction. Although work on these smaller projects has begun, that six-person team is still not fully staffed one year after the money became available.
Although the language in the proposed ballot measure distinguishes between transit projects and road safety projects, the two go hand-in-hand. A report from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute shows that public transportation’s death and injury rate is about one-tenth the casualty rate of car travel, meaning people on the bus or the train are safer than people in cars.
The benefits extend from transit riders to all other road users, too. A study in the Journal of Urban Health found that the overall traffic death rate was lower in U.S. cities with more transit use, and an analysis by the American Transportation Association had similar findings. In other words, the more people take the bus or the train, the safer the roads are for everyone on them. By contrast, the more people drive, the more dangerous the roads are for everyone on them.
This story was originally published June 30, 2026 at 12:21 PM.
