Everyone wants to walk — or bike, run, rollerblade, etc. — down safer city streets. It is a great tragedy when a pedestrian loses their life to an automobile. Jersey City, New Jersey, has one of the highest rates of bikers, walkers or transit users in the country, a fact more common in places like nearby New York City — of which Jersey City constitutes part of the metropolitan area — than a city of just under 300,000 people.

Since 2018, Jersey City’s mayor, Steven Fulop, has dedicated himself and his city to decreasing pedestrian fatalities through a program called Vision Zero. This year, Jersey City received the New Jersey Department of Transportation’s Complete Streets Excellence and Champion Award for improvements implemented through that program.

Barkha Patel, director of the Department of Infrastructure, spoke with The Municipal about the program’s inception and the successes of the last five years. With her background in urban planning and over seven years working for Jersey City, a year and a half directing the department, Patel is highly qualified to oversee the program.

She explained that Vision Zero came about as a combined effort of city advocates “who for many years had been advocating for safer streets and prioritizing people who are vulnerable users of our roadways” and Mayor Fulop, “a big champion and supporter of this work.” These changes have been brought about through executive order.

“Under his leadership, we as a city committed to a Vision Zero goal, which was a really ambitious and new thing for a city at the time, especially in the state of New Jersey,” Patel said. “And the goal was to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities and severe injuries from our city-owned streets by the year 2026.”

To accomplish this, Jersey City utilizes a “multidisciplinary initiative,” involving municipal departments beyond those specifically geared toward infrastructure and engineering, such as fire and police, health and human services and others. The original action plan comprised 77 different actions to accomplish this goal within eight years of its inception. The first consisted of redesigning certain street corridors that had typically been high-injury routes “to better prioritize vulnerable users.”

“You start from a baseline of safety, which is that even one life that’s lost as a result of a traffic crash is one too many, and so the main impetus is to make things as safe as possible,” she continued.

Instead of tackling the issue from a behavioral approach, Jersey City looked at it through the lens of an engineering issue. The city began by looking at specific corridors that had the highest number of fatalities and made changes to those routes, and Patel was pleased to announce that those areas were no longer seeing that level of accidents.

Patel spoke about “road diets,” a technique that reallocates parts of a road for other purposes like bike paths and pedestrian crossings, which increases the safety of these travelers. “In those locations that used to be high-injury locations, we have seen a dramatic reduction of fatal and severe and even moderate crashes.”

Part of the reason Jersey City has been able to accomplish such an ambitious feat has been through the “quick build” process, using low-cost and temporary materials, which can promptly be put into place. It also allowed city residents to become involved in the projects from the start through an urban planning technique known as tactical urbanism, meaning projects are carried out at least in part by the citizens themselves.

This has helped build rapport with community members as well. Residents can call the city about a problem area and rather than waiting months for allocated funds, the response time becomes two or three weeks when city officials meet residents on the streets for a conversation, and then begin working on the project together. “It really changes the game of how you’re interacting with the community by involving them in that process,” Patel remarked.

Temporary building also allows the city to go back to an individual project and either redesign it if the temporary fix was ineffective or make it permanent if it was. Revisiting these quick builds is one goal Patel said the city plans to tackle in the future. The second is to extend the work to other streets connecting to those that have benefitted from Vision Zero. Patel admits that there are still more neighborhoods where the city hasn’t begun work, but hopes to build a “spine network of streets that all connect to each other and are highly, highly safe.”

The project’s goal is an ambitious one. However, residents have responded well overall to these efforts. But as with any new approach in local government, opposition sometimes arises, particularly on individual projects. Redesigning roads means change, which can be difficult, especially in places where residents have lived and worked for years. When those conversations come up, Patel said, is when “the strong commitment from the city and the mayor and our team comes into play,” putting the safety of the individuals first.

Last year marked the first year that zero goal had been met. Though sustaining that number for as long as possible would be ideal, Patel stated that some years, regardless of the efforts of everyone involved, the city still sees a handful of deadly accidents. “The years when we do have a few fatalities, those years are really, really critical for cities like ours because those are the times we should be recommitting to the goal and reinvigorating the reason why we are investing in this and believing in this.”

Vision Zero isn’t just about saving lives; it’s also about making the city streets more appealing to those who call Jersey City home. Patel stated that to maintain the program goals, “you have to really look beyond that and make the streets feel really welcoming and appealing and aesthetically beautiful.” She hopes citizens can see the streets as more than a means to get from one area to another; instead, to view them as “a part of our neighborhood, a living, breathing thing that we should invest in and make really appealing to be able to walk on or bike on.”

The historic nature of the city poses an additional challenge, and narrow streets allow only limited space to make changes, so Patel concedes that there have been some trade-offs in those areas. Jersey City has proven that a city-led accident-reducing plan can be successful, particularly when promoting a community-wide culture of safety. In a city with such high numbers of walkers and transit users, the culture had already been primed to embrace and build upon Vision Zero. The work will continue to achieve and maintain zero loss of pedestrian lives each year for years to come.

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