Complete Streets 

Complete Streets are streets for everyone. Complete Streets is an approach to planning, designing and building streets that enables safe access for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities. Complete streets promotes freedom of choice that is not just reliant on motor vehicles which may be out of reach to our younger or older residents. This approach also emphasizes the needs of those who have experienced systemic underinvestment, or those whose needs have not been met through a traditional transportation approach, such as older adults, people living with disabilities, people with limited incomes and people who don’t have access to vehicle. 

Complete Streets approaches vary based on community context. They may address a wide range of elements, such as sidewalks, bicycle lanes, bus lanes, public transportation stops, crossing opportunities, median islands, accessible pedestrian signals, curb extensions, modified vehicle travel lanes, streetscape, and landscape treatments. 

NJDOT finalized a Complete Streets policy in December 2009. The policy requires that future roadway improvement projects include safe accommodations for all users, including bicyclists, pedestrians, transit riders and the mobility-impaired. At this time all Municipalities in Mercer County as well as the County itself have adopted Complete Street policies. 

Vision Zero 

Vision Zero aims to eliminate all motor vehicle fatalities and severe injury crashes while providing safe, healthy, and equitable mobility for all. Vision Zero views crashes as preventable and takes a holistic systems approach to safety. The significant loss of life exacts a tragic toll and includes not only personal economic costs and emotional trauma to those suffering but also includes a significant cost to taxpayer spending on emergency response and long-term healthcare costs. 

Vision Zero also recognizes that people will sometimes make mistakes, so the road system and related policies should be designed to ensure those inevitable mistakes do not result in severe injuries or fatalities. Reaching zero deaths requires the implementation of a Safe System approach, in which those mistakes should never lead to death.  

Applying the Safe System approach involves anticipating human mistakes by designing and managing road infrastructure to keep the risk of a mistake low; and when a mistake leads to a crash, the impact on the human body doesn’t result in a fatality or serious injury.