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Resilience Target 3

Current Status

Ongoing

Activity In 2022

331 fatalities, 1619 serious injuries*

Beyond 2022

Reduce fatalities to 0 on Houston streets by 2030

Related Initiatives

Related Targets

How Does Traffic Safety Increase Resilience?

A resilient Houston is a welcoming and safe place for all Houstonians, no matter their age, health status, or physical ability. This means ensuring that people can walk, bike, and ride on safe streets without fear. It means that streets, parks, neighborhoods, and buildings are designed to accommodate residents of all physical abilities and ages, including our children, our senior citizens, and Houstonians with disabilities. In 2020, the City carried out the development of a Vision Zero Action Plan and in 2021 launched “Humans of Houston” to capture the stories of Houstonians affected by street fatalities and serious injuries. From 2021 to 2022, traffic fatalities have remained relatively constant, but serious injuries have dropped by 2%. These statistics are inline with national trends reflecting a leveling off of and slight drop in traffic related fatalities (0.2%) according to the NHTSA. These statistics represent an improvement compared to prior year-to-year trends, with traffic fatalities leveling off. However, traffic related fatalities and serious injuries still remained elevated compared to pre-pandemic rates.

Traffic-Related Fatalities and Serious Injuries in 2022

*Note: Our methodology included pulling records from the Texas Department of Transportation CRIS database that specified the City of Houston. To better align with the Target and the City’s goals around Vision Zero, we are now reporting numbers of fatalities and suspected serious injuries related to crashes, and not the number of accidents themselves. For full transparency, please see the following table.

2021 2022
Crashes with Fatalities 315 313
Crashes with Serious Injuries 1442 1394
Traffic-related Fatalities 330 331
Traffic-related Serious Injuries 1644 1619

2022 Data Source
Texas Department of Transportation and Kinder Institute for Urban Research-Urban Data Platform Team. “Public Crash Data Extract from TxDOT (2021).” Rice University-Kinder Institute: UDP, 2022