Napa City Council to discuss draft Local Roadway Safety Plan | Local News | #citycouncil

According to the draft, the roadway safety plan creates a framework to analyze traffic safety issues within Napa and recommends projects to improve safety. It can also be used to apply for grants that will help fund such safety improvements.

Much of the plan is built from vehicle collision data from 2016 to 2020; the plan analyzes those collisions, identifies high-injury locations and recommends countermeasures. In total, there were 1,207 collisions reported on Napa city roads during that period, according to the draft plan, with about 5% leading to severe injury and 1% — 12 in total — resulting in death.

The plan was also built with input from stakeholder groups, such as the city’s police and fire departments, the city’s bicycle and trails advisory commission, the Napa Valley Unified School District, the Napa Valley Transportation Authority, Slow Down Napa and the Napa County Bicycle Coalition, among others.

And the Napa community also had a chance to participate. In all, 808 comments on the plan came from from community members, who were able to draw lines or pin locations on a map of Napa to indicate where they had traffic concerns. Of those comments, three areas emerged as top concerns; 267 comments concerned speeding, 187 had to do with bicycle and pedestrian safety, and 142 dealt with intersection safety.

Based on the findings of the analysis, the plan emphasizes several future areas for improvement — intersection safety, rear-end collisions and unsafe speeding, broadside collisions, pedestrian safety, nighttime collisions, collisions while driving under the influence, and collisions caused by youth drivers.

Intersection safety is the first focus listed in the plan because 78% of collisions in Napa during the four-year period happened around intersections, including 83% of fatal or major-injury collisions. So strategies to improve intersection safety are listed under the so-called four E’s of traffic safety — education, enforcement, engineering and emergency medical services.

The recommended education strategy for intersection safety, which the city and the Napa Police Department are said to be responsible for, is to “conduct public information and education campaign for intersection safety laws regarding traffic signals, stop signs, and turning left or right.” The listed enforcement strategy, carried out by the police department, is to target enforcement at high-injury intersections to more closely monitor various traffic violations. Improving the EMS response is a matter of ensuring emergency routes are clear and well defined, among other suggestions.

The lengthiest category of improvement for every focus area, however, is engineering. There’s a list of recommended safety engineering projects, eligible for federal Highway Safety Improvement Program grants, displayed near the end of the plan. For Soscol Avenue at West Imola Avenue — the intersection with the most injury collisions over the 2016-20 period — suggested improvements include improving signal timing, pavement friction, and upgrading intersection markings, along with many more suggestions.

Kara Vernor, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition, said in an email that while the road safety plan isn’t a citywide traffic safety or calming plan, it stands to make improvements along Napa’s high-injury road network. She added the coalition hopes that the plan will help the city secure grant funding for bike and pedestrian safety improvements, especially at the city’s most dangerous intersections.

She also noted that bicycle safety wasn’t emphasized in the plan, and suggested that might be because bicyclists have learned to avoid high-injury areas. That would lead to a reduction in collisions involving bicycles, Vernor said, but the potential aversion to those areas from bicyclists cuts down on the convenience and accessibility of biking.

“We hope that other plans and studies will take this into consideration and validate the need for bicycle infrastructure improvements along the high-injury network, so that more bicyclists feel they can use roads like Soscol and Jefferson, for example,” Vernor wrote.

Maureen Trippe, co-founder of Slow Down Napa — a community movement that started in 2020 because of concerns about speeding in residential neighborhoods — said it’s important to recognize what the road safety plan is, that it doesn’t actualize traffic safety improvements on its own.

“It isn’t about residential neighborhoods. It isn’t about bikes and pedestrians. It isn’t about traffic calming. It is about crash data,” Trippe said. “It’s a data collection tool that can inform a plan, but it is not a plan per se. The consultant has given a number of measures and countermeasures but there’s no budget assigned, there’s no responsibility, there’s no action that goes with it.”

Trippe noted that the city is also working on an update to its 2005 traffic calming guidelines this year, which will involve 15 public workshops and is funded by a $150,000 expenditure from the city. The safety plan, in comparison, has cost the city $80,000, with $72,000 of that coming from a California state grant.

But despite the traffic calming guideline update focusing more on Napa’s neighborhoods, it also won’t get specific projects to improve traffic safety started, Trippe said.

“We’ve been pretty patient in working and learning the system and the processes, but I think it’s time for us to stand up and say can we put some money into some specific projects,” Trippe said.