Thank you to Julia Griswold, Safe Transportation Research and Education Center Acting Co-Director, Safety Research Lead, who presented Toward Safe Speeds: A Multipronged Approach to Addressing Deadly Speed-related Crashes in California at the Transportation Seminar Oct. 19, 2023.
Abstract: Over the past 5 years, more than 30% of fatal and serious injury crashes in California have involved a speeding vehicle. Excess speed increases the risk of roadway crashes by increasing the stopping distance and the risk of greater injury by exponentially increasing the impact forces of a crash. Pedestrians and bicyclists, lacking any protection, are particularly vulnerable in these crashes. In 2020, the Zero Traffic Fatalities Task Force exposed limitations in California’s current speed-limit-setting approach and spurred further action by the State to address excessive speed limits and speeding-related crashes. This presentation will describe the current policy context, several of the efforts to support Safe Speeds in California–including developing an education toolkit, workshop and technical assistance for communities looking to implement new flexibility in speed-limit-setting from recent legislation, developing a Safe System Approach to setting speed limits for the State, and developing a speed-related safety monitoring program to identify high-risk locations for targeted countermeasures–and the barriers to further progress.
Bio: Julia Griswold is the Acting Co-Director and Safety Research Lead at the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center at UC Berkeley and serves as technical lead on projects related to bicyclist and pedestrian safety. Her research expertise and interests include collection and processing of nonmotorized transportation data, bicyclist and pedestrian and exposure modeling, improving access to safety data, and bicyclist level of service measures. Julia developed her first pedestrian exposure model for her master’s thesis in Geography at San Francisco State in 2006. She began working at SafeTREC as a graduate student researcher in 2009, continued as a postdoctoral scholar after completing her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2013, and has served in her current academic researcher position since 2017.