680 Pedestrians Were Hit By Cars In Boston In 2018: Vision Zero

BOSTON — Last year, 680 pedestrians and 425 cyclists were struck by cars on city streets and none of those cyclists died, according to Vision Zero's progress report. For the past three years, the Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition has been reviewing the city's progress toward eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries by the year 2030. To that end, they study data and then release it annually showing progress and make recommendations on how the city could get to fewer fatalities.

Since the Vision Zero program began, the number of fatal crashes on Boston streets (they do not tally state road statistics) has gone down, with 10 fatal crashes in 2018, down from 21 in 2016. However, the total number of crashes requiring EMS response has increased during the same three years, with more than 4,367 total injury crashes last year, according to city data.

According to the 2018 report card, the city is showing leadership when it comes to the fundamentals: It gave positive marks to the city's effort to create a high crash network map to help identify high density area of crashes, and putting data on the city's website. But the coalition gave a score of "needs improvement" when it comes to implementing consistent collection and analysis of speed sign data and collecting and reporting thorough crash data. The coalition recommended the city employ a full time Boston Police data analyst to clean up crash report data, investigate trends and work with the transportation department, Boston EMS and MassDOT, similar to what's being done in Portland.

By way of comparison, in the first two months this year, there were four traffic related deaths, including three pedestrians and one person in a vehicle, according to the latest data.

The coalition gave a "making progress" mark to the city for transparency.

Patch reporter Jenna Fisher can be reached at Jenna.Fisher@patch.com or by calling 617-942-0474. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram (@ReporterJenna).