Vision Zero Success Story – Infrastructure

Background

The City of Fremont Vision Zero 2020 Status Report and Action Plan, published in March 2016, identified that approximately 50 percent of the City’s fatal and serious injury collisions occurred in the early or late evening, with the higher percentage of crashes occurring in the early evening period between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. In response to this data, the City accelerated an environmental sustainability initiative to upgrade street lighting to achieve more immediate safety benefits. Under this new initiative, the City replaced and retrofitted every existing street light with energy efficient light-emitting diode (LED) light fixtures. The LED fixtures, compared to previous high-pressure sodium lighting, improved nighttime visibility through better color rendering, provided more uniform lighting distributions, allowed for much greater flexibility regarding overall lighting output and control, and eliminated many dark areas between poles. Since nighttime driving inherently involves a low-light vision environment, the improved color contrast by LED lighting will provide better detection of pedestrians and roadside fixed objects.