The North Salt Lake City Council is looking into the possibility of adding bike lanes after attending a bike tour called the Mobile Active Transportation Tour (MATT) in Hoboken and Jersey City, New Jersey. Many people participated in this tour, representing cities in Utah, including North Salt Lake Councilmember Ted Knowlton and Community Development Director Sherrie Pace. The tour covered many places where the company Vision Zero is improving the roads and transportation. “In 2017, they (Hoboken) had an elderly woman that was killed in an auto-pedestrian accident on their Main Street, and that was the turning point that they said, enough is enough,” said Sherrie Pace. “We need to figure out what the problem is here, and we need to find some solutions because one death is too many, so they started their Vision Zero program.” 

They’re striving to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030, and there haven’t been any traffic deaths since 2017. “They took a normal, average level of traffic fatalities and injuries of all types in a normal American city and took them to just about zero,” said Ted Knowlton.

“They evaluated where they had the most crashes in the city, and then they looked at those intersections to see what they could do,” said Pace.

A lot of changes have been made to protect bikers and pedestrians from getting hit or injured by cars. Many of the pedestrian paths are different than the bike paths. They separated bike lanes from parking spaces on the side of the road. 

“People could ride bicycles going two ways, and you didn’t worry about crashing into pedestrians because they were actually on another path just adjacent to it,” said Pace. “They wanted the bike lane separated from the on-street parking. The bike lane is between the sidewalk and the parked cars instead of having the parked cars on one side and then the bike lane against the travel traffic, separating the vehicles and the bikes.”

They used flexible delineators, which are small poles, to separate the car traffic from the bike and pedestrian traffic. Instead of constantly repainting the bike lane areas, thermoplastic was used. 

Lines were painted on the road to make areas for electric bike and car stations. More lines were painted on the streets to show road curves and bus stops. “They used a lot of paint treatments, painting the lines that were not to cross, showing the radiuses of the curve and making it feel a little safer for pedestrians to step out onto the corner,” said Pace. (In some areas, they reduced the speed limit to 20 mph.) 

They made many one-way streets “because they wanted to make sure they could still have on-street parking,” said Pace. “They wanted to make sure that people understood why they were doing the signage.” 

They made a sign that indicated that a pedestrian had been hit by a car and killed. This was to “remind people why they had made these improvements so it’s a constant thought on their minds and why the streets have been changed and how they’re putting a priority on the safety of the bicycles and pedestrians. We can implement some of these things in our city, like the bike lanes.”