On August 23, 2022, the City of Lancaster adopted its own Local Road Safety Plan (LRSP) and Vision Zero Resolution. These are both an advancement of the City's Safer Streets Action Plan (Systemic Safety Analysis Report), adopted in December 2019.

The City's LRSP identifies emphasis areas to inform and guide further safety evaluation of the City’s transportation network. The emphasis areas include type of crash, certain locations, and notable relationships between current efforts and crash history.

The LRSP analyzes crash data on an aggregate basis as well as at specific locations to identify high-crash locations, high-risk locations, as well as citywide trends and patterns. This produced the City's High-Severe Injury and High-Fatality Roadway Networks.

The analysis of crash history throughout the City’s transportation network allows for opportunities to:

• Identify factors in the transportation network that inhibit safety for all roadway users,
• Improve safety at specific high-crash locations, reduce serious injury and fatal collisions, and
• Develop safety measures using the four E’s of safety: Engineering, Enforcement, Education, and Emergency Response to encourage safer driver behavior and better severity outcomes.

With this LRSP, the City continues its safety efforts by identifying areas of emphasis and systemic recommendations to enhance safety.

The City’s vision is to enhance the transportation network and reduce traffic fatalities and serious injury related crashes, and the goals for the City of Lancaster include the following:

• Goal #1: Identify areas with a high risk for crashes.
• Goal #2: Illustrate the value of a comprehensive safety program and the systemic process.
• Goal #3: Plan future safety improvements for near-, mid- and long-term.
• Goal #4: Define safety projects for Highway Safety Improvement Plan (HSIP) and other program funding consideration.

Vision Zero

When the Mayor and City Council adopted the LRSP, they also reinforced their commitment to the safety of Lancaster residents and families by adopting a Vision Zero Resolution. Through this action, Lancaster has pledged to tackle ambitious transportation improvements to achieve zero traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2050. 

Dubbed “Vision Zero”, this worldwide initiative challenges cities to increase safe, healthy, equitable mobility. Reaching zero deaths requires the implementation of a Safe System approach. 

The Safe System approach requires a supporting safety culture that places safety first and foremost in road system investment decisions. Road design and management should encourage safe speeds and manipulate appropriate crash angles to reduce injury severity. 

Ultimately though, to achieve the City’s zero deaths vision, everyone traveling in Lancaster must share responsibility for ensuring they are doing so with care and encouraging others to adopt the same commitment. Residents can anticipate seeing more about how they can get involved in the City’s Vision Zero effort in 2023.

Safer Streets Action Plan

On January 28, 2020, the City Council adopted the Lancaster Safer Streets Action Plan, a.k.a. the Systemic Safety Analysis Report. Through the implementation of this action plan, the City will be proactively addressing traffic safety concerns by applying engineering countermeasures systemically across Lancaster’s roadway network.

In the few years, the City has been proactively addressing “hot spot” collision locations with proven engineering countermeasures like “road diets”, 4-way stops, protected left-turn signals, and roundabouts. These countermeasures have proven to be great at reducing the total number of collisions at these locations, and reducing the severity of collisions that still occur. These countermeasures have no doubt saved lives in Lancaster and will continue to do so. In fact, these engineering counter measure are getting results even beyond what research suggested possible.

• By implementing “road diets”, which involves reducing the number of travel lanes, lane widths, and adding bike lanes to help reduce speeds and the severity of collisions, the City has seen a 60% reduction in crashes on Valley Central Way and a 24% reduction in crashes on Lancaster Blvd.
• Since converting 4 two-way stop-controlled intersections to all-way stop-controlled intersections, there has been an 87% average reduction in crashes at those locations. Furthermore, there has been a 93% reduction in severe injury crashes and a 100% reduction in fatalities.
• After adding a protected left-turn signal to Avenue J and 20th Street West, there has been a near elimination of left-turn crashes at that location.
• At the City’s first roundabout, Avenue L/Challenger Way, where there was at least one fatality a year and several severe injury crashes, there has been a 100% reduction in fatality-related crashes, a 90% reduction in people injured, and a 92% reduction in total crash victims.

The successes of these countermeasures have proven that they are indeed effective at saving lives in Lancaster. Through the Lancaster Safer Streets Action Plan, the City now has a traffic safety program to eliminate traffic-related deaths and severe injuries City-wide by applying these and other countermeasures systemically to locations with similar crash types.

The Lancaster Safer Streets Action Plan is the result of the City participating in the Systematic Safety Analysis Report Program (SSARP), funded by a Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) grant. The intent of this HSIP program is to assist local agencies in future transportation safety program grant applications. Agencies that have their own Systematic Safety Analysis Report are given priority consideration for funding. The City will be utilizing this report when it applies for the HSIP Call for Projects (Cycle 10) this spring.

• Executive Summary and Chapter 1: Plan and Policy Review
• Chapter 2: Crash Analysis Summary
• Chapter 3: Project Recommendations
  • Projects 1 and 2
  • Projects 3 and 4
  • Projects 5 and 6
  • Projects 7 and 8
  • Projects 9 and 10
  • Projects 11 and 12
• Chapter 4: Funding Sources
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Detailed Crash Analysis
    •  
    • Section 2
  • Appendix B: Countermeasure Toolbox
    • Bikeway Countermeasures
    • Pedestrian Countermeasures
    • Roadway Countermeasures
    • Additional Countermeasures
  • Appendix C: Summary of Outreach Events
  • Appendix D: Scenario Planning Cut-Sheets 
  • Appendix E: HSIP Analyzer Tools

The Lancaster Safer Streets Action Plan was developed in partnership with a consultant team of representatives from Fehr & Peers, Transpo Group, Kimley-Horn, Andrew Yi, and Interwest Group.