Last week, the U.S. Safe Streets Index ranked San Antonio the 17th most dangerous metro in the nation in terms of road safety. For one of the fastest growing cities in the country this ranking exposes a fatal flaw in our development, a car-centric model that is as lethal as it is unsustainable.
StreetLight, a traffic data and analysis company, and publisher of the index, gave the top 100 metros in the U.S. quantifiable rankings in five categories: vehicle miles traveled, speed difference between vehicles, speed based pedestrian risk, truck activity and residential speeding. Of these five categories, San Antonio road safety ranked below average in three areas: vehicle miles traveled, speed difference between vehicles, and speed based pedestrian risk. Rankings in miles traveled and pedestrian risk were among the bottom 11% nationwide, a product of developing a city with safety second to speed.
The city’s worst ranking was speed based pedestrian risk, at 93/100, indicating a prevalence of pedestrians in high-traffic, fast-moving areas at risk of traffic-related injuries and deaths. The risk pedestrians face is only exacerbated by San Antonio’s performance in another metric: vehicle miles traveled, which measures vehicles’ raw volume of distance driven. San Antonio’s risk factor scored at 89/100 in this area. Any amount of driving is directly correlated with risk for those driving and passersby. With San Antonio’s current sprawling auto-centric infrastructure, the need for long distance driving is ever-present.
Interestingly, San Antonio ranked an impressive No. 4 in the least residential speeding, the percentage of drivers going more than five miles over the speed limit on residential roads. While this statistic provides some comfort for the future of the city’s road safety, the lifting of blame from drivers’ behavior also serves to point towards the fundamental issues with our road system: high speed intersections, unprotected crosswalks, and road design that engenders the dangerous environment uncharacteristic of many of our nation’s biggest metros.
Thankfully, these issues are currently being combated by San Antonio’s “Vision Zero” plan, which aims to eliminate all traffic-related deaths. The plan was previously adopted in 2016 and proved largely ineffective as fatal/severe crashes in San Antonio increased by nearly 5% from 2019 to 2022. Since then, efforts have pivoted from emphasizing individual responsibility to recalibrating to the Safe System Approach. Instead of insisting that San Antonio’s road safety issues stem from a lack of education on the drivers’ end, this new approach turns attention to the pedestrian-hostile nature of the roads. The plan concedes that accidents are inevitable and wants to ensure that when they occur, the consequences are less severe.
At a City Council Meeting last month, Councilmember Sukh Kaur discussed a federal grant that will allow the city to work on “quick-build projects,” small-scale but highly impactful changes to infrastructure, as simple as adding crosswalks, that aim to determine a much needed long-term plan for improvement to pedestrian safety.
