How you can help decrease traffic fatalities in Hillsborough County through Vision Zero?

The Hillsborough Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) is working to make the county's roads safer for drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists, and it wants you to help.
 
On Oct. 25, the MPO will host a workshop, 9-11 a.m., at Ragan Park Community Center, 1200 E. Lake Ave. in Tampa, to get input for a community action plan called Vision Zero.
 
The initiative started in Sweden as a road traffic safety project in 1997. Since then, it's been picked up by many cities around the world, including the United States, according to Gena Torres, executive planner for Hillsborough's MPO.
 
"The whole premise of it is even one traffic fatality is too many," Torres says.
 
Hillsborough County has one of the highest traffic fatality rates in Florida. As of Oct. 12, there have been 142 traffic crashes with fatalities this year, including 27 pedestrian fatalities and 10 bicyclist fatalities, according to data from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.
 
The Hillsborough MPO had a Vision Zero kickoff in June with community and business leaders, as well as bicycle and pedestrian activists, and got an idea of the direction it should take with the initiative, Torres explains. The result is a total of four workshops, with the first in October. Future workshops will take place in January, April and July.
 
At each event, attendees will brainstorm steps the county can take to reduce traffic fatalities. Topics include: how to get or keep limited resources focused on key locations with safety issues; how to reach target audiences; how to insist on good behavior in the rights of way; and how to avoid re-creating the problems that the county currently experiences as new areas are built or roads are reconstructed.
 
The ideas will become part of the action plan.
 
"The goal of the action plan is to be a 1- or 2-year implementable thing," Torres says.
 
To register for the first workshop, call Torres at 813-273-3774, extension 357, or email her here.
 
"People who really are passionate: Come on," Torres says. "We want to have everybody."