2025 Fatalities
43
As of October 21.
There were 62 traffic-related
deaths at this time in 2024.
Vision Zero Cleveland Mission
Vision Zero Cleveland is working to eliminate serious injuries and deaths from crashes on Cleveland roads through clear, measurable strategies to provide safe, healthy, and equitable mobility for all.
The Cleveland City Planning Commission adopted the Vision Zero Action Plan on September 2, 2022. This plan aims to eliminate serious injuries and fatalities on Cleveland roads. This will create safer transportation in Cleveland where everyone shares responsibility for making our roads safer and everyone can move safely through the city whether they are walking, rolling, or driving.
What is Vision Zero?
First adopted in Sweden in 1997, Vision Zero is a systems approach to eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries. This is done through safer street design, speed management, and improvements in vehicular and road user safety. The Vision Zero approach highlights that we can prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries. To do this, the transportation system must prioritize safety in decision-making. It should also provide access to safe, healthy, and fair mobility for everyone. In the United States, more than 60 cities have made Vision Zero pledges and have begun making targeted changes to improve transportation safety. You can find more information about Vision Zero at the Vision Zero Network.
Why is Vision Zero Important?
Over the last five years, more than one person died or was seriously injured every day in Cleveland. Even one traffic-related death is a death too many. Vision Zero Cleveland is an ambitious response to this unacceptable number of serious and fatal injury crashes that affect people living, working, and visiting the city. Targeted and swift action is needed over the next ten years to achieve our goal of zero fatal and serious injury crashes. On average, there were 450 fatal and serious injury crashes annually between 2018 and 2024.
Vision Zero Action Plan
The Vision Zero Action Plan was adopted by the City Planning Commission on September 2, 2022. The planning process was guided by data analysis, input from a project task force, and two rounds of extensive in-person and virtual community outreach between 2021 and 2022.
Appendix A. Strategies and Actions List
Appendix B. Countermeasures Toolbox
Appendix C. Existing Conditions Analysis
Data Analysis
The Vision Zero approach uses data analysis to understand the causes of and solutions for crashes on our transportation network. Explore crashes leading to fatalities and serious injuries on Cleveland streets using the crash dashboard below.
Vision Zero Cleveland Crash Dashboard
January 1, 2015 - December 31, 2024 Crash Data
The dashboard below shows fatal and serious injury crashes in the City of Cleveland from 2015 to 2024, along with Cleveland’s 2020–2024 High Crash Segment network. Crash data comes from the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) database, which is compiled from reports submitted by law enforcement agencies throughout the city.
Click here to view a larger version of the dashboard.
Take Action
Additional Vision Zero Resources
Successful Vision Zero programs create and maintain safe streets, safe speeds, safe people, and safe vehicles. Transportation organizations such as the Vision Zero Network, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and others research and report on best practices to guide progress. There are also many lessons to learn from other cities and countries that are pursuing zero traffic-related serious injuries and deaths.
- FHWA Proven Safety Countermeasures - Nearly fifteen years ago, FHWA began promoting and encouraging widespread implementation of certain safety improvements and strategies based on their proven effectiveness. This effort became known as the Proven Safety Countermeasures initiative (PSCi). Through the PSCi, State, Tribal, and local road authorities have partnered with FHWA to mainstream over a dozen different safety improvements and strategies.
- Safe Transportation for Every Pedestrian (STEP) Guidance - Through the Every Day Counts STEP initiative, FHWA promotes design countermeasures to improve pedestrian crossing locations and reduce crashes, including road diets, pedestrian hybrid beacons, and pedestrian refuge islands.
- NACTO Urban Street Design Guide - A blueprint for designing 21st century streets, the Guide unveils the toolbox and the tactics cities use to make streets safer, more livable, and more economically vibrant. The Guide outlines both a clear vision for complete streets and a basic road map for how to bring them to fruition.
- NACTO City Limits - Using the safe systems approach, City Limits provides a consistent, scalable approach to urban speed limit setting, from citywide strategies to corridor-by-corridor methods based on easy-to-study street characteristics.
- ITE & FHWA Noteworthy Speed Management Practices - This document highlights eight noteworthy speed management practices from advocacy to countermeasures: strategic speed management, self-enforcing roadways, setting credible speed limits, high visibility enforcement, adoption of safety cameras, reporting speed-related crashes, consistent speed limits for vulnerable road users, and network approaches to setting speed limits.
- NTSB Reducing Speed-Related Crashes Involving Passenger Vehicles - This safety study examines speeding-related passenger vehicle crashes and countermeasures to prevent these crashes, including (1) speed limits, (2) data-driven approaches for speed enforcement, (3) automated speed enforcement, (4) intelligent speed adaptation, and (5) national leadership.
- Vision Zero Equity Strategies for Practitioners - This case study highlights context-sensitive equity strategies to achieve traffic safety. Cities across the country are struggling with racial disparities as well as income inequity. How do we ensure that the processes, strategies and outcomes of Vision Zero serve all, particularly vulnerable and traditionally underserved populations? And how do we analyze for and then mitigate or ameliorate unintended consequences of Vision Zero that may exacerbate other challenges within those communities?
- Public Transit Is Key Strategy in Advancing Vision Zero - Public transportation is increasingly recognized as a core strategy to support safe mobility for all. Public transportation is one of the safest ways to travel. It is ten times safer per mile than traveling by car because it has less than a tenth the per-mile traffic casualty (injury or death) rate as automobile travel.
- Communication Strategies to Advance Vision Zero - The language of Vision Zero itself -- with the goal to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries -- communicates a more ambitious approach to street safety and rests on the basic understanding that these serious losses are preventable. This case study, looks at two early-adopter cities -- New York City and San Francisco -- and their promising approaches to communicating about Vision Zero in order to garner attention and influence behavior.
- Optimizing Large Vehicles for Urban Environments - Municipal and private fleet operators and policy makers can potentially reduce the number of fatalities involving large trucks by redesigning the vehicles themselves in ways that are more compatible with safe, vibrant city streets.
- Truck Sideguards for Vision Zero: Review and Technical Recommendations - Sideguards are vehicle-based safety devices that help prevent pedestrians and cyclists, and potentially motorcyclists, from falling into the exposed space between the axles of trucks with high ground clearance. The fatality rate for bicyclists and pedestrians colliding with the side of a truck decreased by 61% and by 20%, respectively, following a national sideguard requirement in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
- The Road to Zero: Smart Cars, Fewer Crashes (excerpt) - Just over half of today’s vehicles offer advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). ADAS include a wide variety of technologies, and not every car is equipped with every one. But most cars now come standard with what once seemed like revolutionary technologies. A key reason for the decline of fatalities is just how much safer the vehicles are.