Vision Zero

In March 2024, the Borough adopted the Next Generation Safety and Mobility Plan (NextGen Plan), a strategic 10- to 15-year roadmap for multimodal projects that improve pedestrian access, bicycling, transit, and micromobility throughout the Borough of State College. The NextGen Plan was designed to meet federal Safety Action Plan requirements and included a high-level analysis of safety and crash trends in the Borough.

Building on this foundation and using a Federal Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grant, the State College Borough Vision Zero Action Plan will create a roadmap for improving roadway safety and reducing dangerous conditions throughout the Borough. Developed in collaboration with stakeholders and the community, the Vision Zero Plan will start with a detailed safety analysis that identifies a High Injury Network (HIN) on the Borough’s streets that have the highest frequency of severe crashes. The Vision Zero Plan will then use the Safe System approach to connect proven safety countermeasures to specific locations, identify systemic safety treatments, and recommend policies, education, and outreach strategies that will improve safety. It will also establish an actionable framework for advancing the Vision Zero Plan recommendations toward the goal of eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries in Borough of State College and achieving Vision Zero.

What Is Vision Zero and the Safe Systems Approach?

Vision Zero is a global movement built on a simple but powerful belief: traffic deaths and serious injuries are preventable — not inevitable. It calls on communities to design and operate their transportation systems so that human mistakes do not result in human lives lost.

To turn Vision Zero into action, the Vision Zero Plan will apply the Federal Highway Administration's Safe System Approach — a holistic framework that anticipates human error and keeps crash forces at levels the human body can tolerate.

The Safe System Approach is built on six guiding principles: 

  1. Death and Serious Injury are Unacceptable: No one should die or be seriously injured using our transportation system.
  2. Humans Make Mistakes: Our streets must be designed and operated to accommodate human error. 
  3. Humans Are Vulnerable: People have physical limits to tolerating crash forces — design must respect those limits. 
  4. Responsibility is Shared: All stakeholders — road users, agencies, designers, vehicle manufacturers — share responsibility for safety. 
  5. Safety is Proactive: We must identify and mitigate risks before crashes occur, not after. 
  6. Redundancy is Crucial: When one part of the system fails, other layers must still protect people. 

Vision Zero Safe System Approach

The Vision Zero Action Plan is more than a technical document; it is a commitment to everyone who lives, works, studies, and travels in the Borough of State College. The Vision Zero Plan will address the distinct safety needs of a college town, where students are a major part of daily travel and where high multimodal activity, a vibrant downtown, strong transit demand, and state-owned corridors must safely accommodate many users.

The central goal of the Vision Zero Action Plan is straightforward but ambitious to eliminate all fatal and serious injury crashes on the Borough's transportation network and to build a system that is safe, equitable, and accessible for every road user. 

To get there, the Vision Zero Plan will: 

  • Establish a clear Vision Zero target year that is both ambitious and achievable for the Borough
  • Set measurable goals, objectives, and performance measures aligned with SS4A program requirements
  • Identify infrastructure, programs, education, enforcement, and policy strategies that work together as a system
  • Center equity, recognizing that traffic safety disproportionately impacts people of color, lower-income residents, and people who walk, bike, or take the bus
  • Build a framework that the Borough and local partners can use to track progress, adapt over time, and update the Plan every five years
  • Implementation readiness and early action. Identify near-term actions that can be advanced shortly after plan adoption while preparing high-priority projects for future funding, grant opportunities, and long-term implementation

Timeline

Vision the Zero Timeline Here

The project runs from June 2026 through April 2027. A draft plan will be shared with the community prior to final adoption.  Opportunities for public comments will be identified on this page at a later date.

For more information on Vision Zero, email the Borough's Transportation Engineer.