On Monday afternoon, city leaders and transportation policymakers gathered to celebrate the unveiling of Vision Zero’s 10 Year Report on Austin’s progress toward making traffic deaths a thing of the past.
“Traffic crashes aren’t accidents. They are preventable,” said Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes during the press conference Monday. “They are a public health crisis, and like any health crisis, they require direct, holistic response.”
That response has yielded results. Out of the six largest Texas cities (Austin, Dallas, Houston, Ft. Worth, El Paso and San Antonio), Austin continues to have the lowest per capita serious injury and fatality rate. However, there is more work to be done. Though 2024 saw the fewest serious injuries recorded since the beginning of Vision Zero in 2015, crash fatalities have remained flat.
“If today is an average day on the streets and roads of Texas, 11 people will die in a sudden, violent, unexpected event,” said Jay Crossley, executive director of Farm & City, a local urban planning and transportation nonprofit. In fact, 2000 was the last year where there was a deathless day on Texas roads.
Still, in the last decade, Vision Zero’s 500 new pedestrian crossings, over 320 miles of new or upgraded sidewalks, over 600 Safe Routes to Schools projects and over 130 transit enhancements have resulted in some improvements.
The city began work on Vision Zero in 2015, though Austin became one of the first cities in the nation to adopt such a policy in 2012, along with Chicago, San Francisco and New York. One of Austin’s first big moves toward its stated goal of zero traffic fatalities was to ban cellphone use while driving or biking in 2015. In 2016, voters made their first big investment in that year’s $15 million Mobility Bond, $6 million of which was allocated to improve safety at Austin’s top five high-crash intersections.
In the intervening years, Vision Zero garnered another $75 million from the 2018 Mobility Bond, $65 million from the 2020 Mobility Bond and almost $34 million total from 2022-2024, from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grant program. Austin put that funding toward myriad infrastructure improvements, like safer pedestrian crossings, intersection safety improvements, better lighting and the Living Streets program.
“On corridors like South Pleasant Valley, Barton Springs and Bluff Springs, where dangerous speeding once endangered everyone, we’ve seen a 60 to 70 percent drop in excessive speeding,” said Austin Transportation and Public Works Director Richard Mendoza. At Bluff Springs, there was a 30 percent reduction in crashes. The Barton Springs Road Safety Pilot has reduced the daily average number of people driving faster than 40 mph by 65 percent over the six-month pilot period, according to city-collected data.
Intersection improvements like protected left turns, protected intersections, protected bike lanes and speed limit reductions have reduced fatal and serious injury crashes by an average of 38 percent.
“That’s not an abstract percentage,” said Mendoza. “It’s dozens of lives saved, countless injuries prevented, and families spared unimaginable grief.”
However, fatalities have remained high – largely because Vision Zero isn’t only a City responsibility. Other agencies like TxDOT own roads within city limits, like Lamar Boulevard, for example. Most of Austin’s traffic deaths – 65 to 75 percent – happen on those roads.
Some of this is due to state law, or state cooperation. The report notes that there is a “tension between state design standards that often prioritize vehicle flow over Safe System principles, which can hamper safety efforts. Furthermore, state laws banning automated enforcement (such as red light cameras) and limiting speed-setting flexibility add challenges to improving safety.”
However, TxDOT does work with Vision Zero by doing things like installing temporary pedestrian barriers on I-35, which resulted in decreased fatalities and agreeing to include grade-separated crossings for the I-35 expansion long-term. In the last five years, TxDOT has spent about $186 million on safety projects like widening center turn lanes, implementing shared use paths and adding signals. Over the next four years, said TxDOT’s Austin District Engineer Tucker Ferguson, another $135 million is expected to be spent on another 65 projects. TxDOT’s Road to Zero framework shoots for 50 percent reduction in deaths by 2035, and zero by 2050. (Travis County set its own goals mirroring TxDOT’s this year.)
“We know that many of these crashes and deaths are caused by speeding, impaired driving, drunk driving, distracted driving, or even the simple task of failing to wear a seat belt. All of these items are preventable,” said Ferguson, urging that educational efforts are “just as critical as our infrastructure projects.”
Collaborating with law enforcement is another aspect of lowering these numbers. The Austin Police Department’s speeding citations have fallen 90 percent since 2015, and the Vision Zero report notes that new APD leadership has indicated a renewed focus on “targeted enforcement.” This time last year, APD expanded its No Refusal impaired driving initiative from weekends and holidays to year-round.
These fatalities do discriminate. Around 40-60 percent of pedestrian, cyclist and e-scooter deaths involve people experiencing homelessness. For the last 10 years, Black Austinites have comprised around 15 percent of those killed or seriously injured in crashes, but only 7.5 percent of the population, a 2 to 1 overrepresentation. Low-income areas of Austin experience four times the serious or fatal traffic injuries per capita as high-income areas.
This is an area where infrastructure changes could help, at least partially. “These disparities likely reflect increased exposure to wide, high-speed roadways and financial barriers to access vehicles with modern safety features,” the report reads. In response, Vision Zero is incorporating “new data sources to better understand injury patterns among populations where crashes are often underreported.”
Over the next 10 years, Vision Zero has identified a few local projects that could help reduce traffic deaths. Project Connect would reduce driving, and cities with robust transit consistently show lower fatality rates. Emerging technology like AI, remote sensing and data from connected vehicles, smart signals, and autonomous vehicles have the potential to reduce behavior-related crashes.
But progress on Vision Zero will be hindered by a lack of funding. The program has relied upon federal grants, which are becoming more scarce and unreliable, and local bonds, most of which will be spent by 2026, the report notes. In the face of that funding gap, perhaps the most important of all strategies will be the cooperation of the state and other entities.
“We need Travis County, Cedar Park, Hays County, CAMPO, Lakeway, TxDOT and CTRMA (Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority) to catch up and move forward together,” urged Crossley in the press conference. “We need TxDOT spending hundreds of millions of dollars making busy streets like North Lamar safe and comfortable to drive, walk, bike and use frequent transit. Regional decision making must get serious. Austin has shown what’s possible. We must have the political will to work with our state, our region and our people to fund the work that saves Texans’ lives.”
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Correction, October 15, 2025 11:06 am:
A typo has been corrected.