Friendly Streets for Vision Zero Hamilton: a New Partnership with the City of Hamilton
Friendly Streets has entered a partnership with the City of Hamilton’s Vision Zero program, for a year-long initiative called Friendly Streets for Vision Zero. As of fall 2019, we will be establishing resident and community stakeholder working groups in the Keith, Kirkendall North, and Butler neighbourhoods (see map below). These groups will explore solutions to traffic safety concerns and improved neighbourhood livability.
Why Vision Zero?
Vision Zero is a global movement with a simple mission: to have zero serious injuries or deaths occur on roadways (traffic violence). This term was coined in Sweden is 1997, and is now moving towards a focus of eliminating traffic violence and promoting active mobility. Vision Zero Canada is based on these two goals (1).
Through education, enforcement, engineering, evaluation and engagement, the City of Hamilton is exploring the Vision Zero approach with their Vision Zero Hamilton 2019-2025 Action Plan (approved in February, 2019). In Hamilton, there are an average of 415 vulnerable road user (such as pedestrians) collisions per year, the majority leading to deaths or serious injury. The City performed a survey and found that over 90% of Hamiltonians agreed that our roads could be safer (2). The Friendly Streets Project agrees with this, which is why we’ve teamed up with the City to perform outreach on the Vision Zero Plan. We are taking our proven approach to community engagement to help bring the changes residents and community stakeholders want towards safer, more liveable neighbourhoods.
Are you a resident in one of our Friendly Streets for Vision Zero neighbourhoods? Please reach out to us at friendlystreetshamilton@gmail.com to get involved and get your voice heard in the City’s Vision Zero plans.
Survey
Please complete a short survey to help us better understand the challenges of getting around in your neighbour and how we can re-imagine our streets as safer, more enjoyable spaces for people. Click on the following link.
References
(1) Vision Zero Canada https://visionzero.ca/about/
(2) Vision Zero Hamilton Action Plan for 2019-2025 (starting on page 10) https://www.hamilton.ca/sites/default/files/media/browser/2019-04-26/2019-vision-zero-council-report.pdf
Friendly Streets Hamilton 