Increasing Number Of Car Crashes Complicate Boulder’s March Toward Vision Zero

When it comes to preventing serious car crashes — either with another vehicle or, more often, pedestrians and cyclists — the key is left-hand turns. So said Boulder’s traffic engineers at a Tuesday study session on the city’s goal to do just that, and completely eliminate traffic-related fatalities and severe injuries by 2040. There are already few such collisions in Boulder: 535 in the past nine years, of 10,000-some crashes, according to transportation department data. Of those, 23 were fatal. But total crashes have ticked up by 1.5 percent in that time, and collisions with pedestrians have risen 4 percent. Bikes and runners/walkers are involved in 62 percent of crashes that end in serious injury or death.