Rachel Carpenter, Caltrans chief safety officer, told attendees at the UC Davis Active Transportation Symposium that California is shifting from vehicle-centered metrics to a "safe system" approach and announced a new secretarys road safety policy that sets an interim target of a 30 percent reduction in fatal and serious injuries by 2035.

Carpenter said the safe system approach reframes decisions around three risk-management goals: reduce exposure, reduce the likelihood of conflicts, and limit crash severity when collisions occur. "No one should have to be perfect to make it home safely," she said, arguing that speed and separation are central to preventing death and serious injury.

Why it matters: Carpenter said the approach changes engineering, project selection and funding priorities. She said safety must be treated as an operating condition, not merely a project feature, and that equity must be built in because communities that rely most on walking, biking and transit often carry the greatest safety burden.

Implementation steps and programs
Carpenter outlined several implementation actions tied to the new policy. She said Caltrans is revising design standards to prioritize place over roadway speed and partnering with outside organizations to develop target-speed guidance. The department plans proactive safety-improvement programs for each of its 12 districts and is working to align funding toward prevention rather than reaction. "We're building proactive safety improvement programs for each of our 12 districts around the state," Carpenter said.

Road Safety Infrastructure Plans and state priority corridors
To better coordinate local and state action, Carpenter described a new Road Safety Infrastructure Plans effort that will identify high-injury networks at the district level rather than only at the statewide scale. She also described a state priority safety corridor effort that screened the entire states public roads to identify local-network segments with safety challenges; those locations are candidates for state assistance and greater collaboration with cities and counties. Carpenter cited El Camino Real in the Bay Area as an example of a corridor that crosses many jurisdictions and needs coordinated action.

Data, transparency and new data sources
When asked whether Caltrans would publish high-collision concentration maps, Carpenter said the department currently does not release those clusters publicly because identified hotspots go through a traffic safety investigation process to determine appropriate fixes before public release. "At this point, we don't share our crash concentrations," she said.

Carpenter said Caltrans is also piloting new data sources to move from reactive crash-based programs to proactive, risk-based approaches. Pilots include near-miss collection and contracts to obtain telematics data (harsh braking, acceleration/deceleration) to identify risk patterns not visible in crash-only datasets. She cited partnerships with organizations such as SafeTrek and academic tools (for example, Street Story) as part of an effort to capture anecdotal and perceived-safety information in addition to police collision data.

Scope of ADA and accessibility
Asked whether the ADA program would expand beyond slopes and ramps, Carpenter said the ADA program remains focused on its established scope within the Office of Civil Rights but that accessibility considerations are integrated across safety programs. She named the Office of Civil Rights and its ADA program, led by Deputy Director David Deluze, as the departmental point of contact for ADA guidance.

Working with districts and local agencies
Carpenter said Caltrans has created chief safety officer roles in districts and safe-system leads across divisions to translate statewide policy into local projects and to help coordinate with cities, counties and MPOs. She urged stakeholders to work through district safety leads and the department's bike-and-ped advisory forums while acknowledging the scale of organizational change ahead. "We are making that shift. And it's just going to take us some time," she said.

Audience concerns and examples
Audience speakers raised recurring issues: requests for data access and transparency; the need for state support on corridors that cross many local jurisdictions (El Camino Real was cited repeatedly); tradeoffs between parking and protected bike lanes; and the value of public art and incremental process improvements. Carpenter responded by emphasizing state assistance, the new corridor and district plans, education for elected officials, and the role of advisory committees and programs such as the Active Transportation Program in helping communities tell qualitative safety stories.

What was not decided
No formal votes or regulatory changes were taken at the symposium. Carpenter described policy direction and implementation plans but did not announce binding rule changes or specific funding allocations at the event.

Provenance: opening and close of topic in transcript
Topic introduction: Rachel Carpenter begins keynote (transcript block "block2", start tc 01:24). Topic finish: district staffing and rollout remarks (transcript block "block69", tc 51:47).