Tue June 28, 2022 - West Edition #14 Caltrans

Building on its longstanding commitment to safety, Caltrans is unveiling a new Director's Policy on Road Safety, which commits the department to the Safe System approach and reaffirms the vision of reaching zero fatalities and serious injuries on state highways by 2050.

"Caltrans is fully committing to a fundamental shift in road safety and is laying the framework for significant reductions in roadway deaths and injuries," Caltrans Director Toks Omishakin. "We play an important role in the building and maintaining of the state's highways. With the numbers of serious injuries and deaths trending the wrong way, now is the time to focus even more on what we can do to save lives and work collaboratively with other stakeholders who play a role in roadway safety."

California and the rest of the nation are seeing an increase in fatalities and serious injuries on the roadways. In California, more than 3,600 people die each year in traffic crashes and more than 13,000 people are severely injured. More than 3,200 people died on the state's roadways in the first nine months of 2021 — a 17 percent increase from the previous year.

To address this trend, Caltrans is aligning departmental activities, as appropriate, with the Safe System approach, which identifies several interconnected elements to achieving a vision of zero fatalities and serious injuries — safe road users, safe roads, safe speeds, safe vehicles and post-crash care. As part of this policy, Caltrans commits to:

This policy takes steps to further institutionalize a shift that began in 2020, as state transportation leaders recognized a bolder and more focused approach was necessary to combat the troubling rise in fatalities and serious injuries on California roads. The state's 2020-24 Strategic Highway Safety Plan — managed by Caltrans and involving more than 400 stakeholders — was updated to include the Safe System approach.

This policy also aligns with the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Roadway Safety Strategy released earlier in 2022, which set the first national goal of zero roadway fatalities and recognizes the Safe System approach as encompassing a range of roadway safety programs and stakeholders.

"The U.S. Department of Transportation has adopted the Safe System Approach that guides our safety actions within the recently announced National Roadway Safety Strategy to address the national crisis in roadway fatalities and serious injuries," said Stephanie Pollack, deputy federal highway administrator. "We commend Caltrans for adopting this approach and working to bend the curve on roadway fatalities to zero."

The Safe System approach is based on the following principles:

For more information, visit https://dot.ca.gov/programs/safety-programs.

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