Lafayette staff outline Vision Zero safety action plan, prioritize nine-mile local safety network

Michelle Malinakis, Lafayette’s transportation planner, told the City Council at its March 25 workshop that the Vision Zero safety action plan aims to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries through a multi-layered safe-systems approach.

The plan builds from a 2013–2022 crash analysis, a locally focused high-risk network study and public outreach. Malinakis said the goal is “to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injury crashes.”

The nut graf: Staff presented a data-driven method to identify high-risk streets and intersections within Lafayette, proposed a prioritized list of engineering and noninfrastructure strategies, and described how the city will use the action plan to pursue state and federal grants and to feed projects into Lafayette’s capital program and maintenance operations.

City consultants and staff summarized the crash review and network identification. Rey (Ray) Stefani, a road safety engineer with y2ks, said the team analyzed crash records from 2013 through 2022 (data for 2023 was not available in the CDOT database for the study). “In total over those 10 years, there were 67 serious injury crashes and 19 fatal crashes within Lafayette,” Stefani said, describing the study area as the city boundary used for the multimodal transportation plan (MMTP), which includes state…