Caleb Zimmerschied Valadez is a freelance writer. He can be reached at calzimval@gmail.com.

Petaluma is one of many cities in California that has shifted its approach to traffic fatalities in recent years: Instead of focusing on individual errors, city officials look at whether the system itself is safe. For Petaluma, making streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists — who make up about 20% of all traffic fatalities nationwide — is the biggest opportunity for improvement.

“For some, walking and biking are the only available forms of transportation; for others, they’re a way to get exercise and fresh air, save money, or reduce their carbon footprint,” said Bjorn Griepenburg, Petaluma’s active transportation planner. “Whatever the reason, these people traveling outside of cars are disproportionately vulnerable to life-ending and life-altering collisions. We have a responsibility to do everything we can to address that.”

The city’s goal, known as Vision Zero, is to completely eliminate severe or fatal traffic collisions. Some cities that have implemented Vision Zero strategies have reported reductions in traffic fatalities, although results and approaches vary considerably by community.

“Whether or not we can achieve zero [fatalities], who knows, but let’s strive for that,” said Christina Panza, the director of Education and Safe Routes to School for the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for safer bicycling infrastructure.

Petaluma leverages funding from several local, regional, state, and federal sources, including Go Sonoma, a sales tax measure administered by the Sonoma County Transportation Authority, to make its streets safer using both quick-build solutions and long-term infrastructure projects.

Quick-build solutions involve minimal construction and are a relatively low-cost way to test safety improvements before pursuing more permanent, expensive changes. For example, the city has strategically prohibited parking to improve traffic visibility and extended walkways with paint to give pedestrians and cyclists more room and encourage drivers to take slower turns.

Two streets that benefited significantly from quick-build solutions are Rainier Avenue and D Street, both reconfigured to encourage slower traffic, safer pedestrian crossings, and improved bike lanes. The newly painted lines on D Street led to a 38% reduction in multi-party collisions and injury collisions compared to annual averages over the five years prior to the project. A lane reduction on Rainier eliminated injury collisions in the piloted section, with no negative impacts on traffic congestion.

“Speed is the number one factor in fatalities and injuries on the roadways, so we want to slow cars down,” said Panza. “But we need to make our roads more conducive for safe driving, and that requires engineering. You’ve got to look at the infrastructure because people are human; they’re going to make errors.”

Due to the success of the Rainier Avenue pilot project, city officials added permanent protected bike lanes and lane reductions this summer.

“When we zoom in and look at corridors that we’ve improved, we generally will see a downward trend [in crashes],” said Petaluma’s Griepenburg.

Similarly, Petaluma Boulevard South previously saw roughly two injury collisions each year between 2014 and 2021. That number dropped to zero after the city implemented a road diet in 2023.

Despite these changes, the city has still seen a fair number of traffic fatalities and injuries. Nathan Spindel, who sits on the board of directors for the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, noted that pedestrian and cyclist fatalities have risen in the last two years. There were three pedestrian and two cyclist fatalities in 2025, up from one pedestrian fatality in 2024. So far, the city has escaped the trend this year, which he believes was anomalous and unrelated to any systemic issue.

“I feel that the city of Petaluma has been doing a decent job at incrementally making our streets safer, both reactively and proactively,” said Spindel, who praised the city’s “small but mighty” public works team and generally supportive city council. “But progress moves slower than everyone hopes, myself included.”

Incremental progress is, in many ways, expected. “Right now, we are kind of numb to the fact and have accepted that 40,000 people a year are killed by cars,” said Spindel.

Both Panza and Griepenburg also noted that American car culture runs deep, with residents routinely relying on cars when alternative transportation would work just as well or better. That can make it a challenge for more rigorous changes to gain support.

“One question that we will often hear at many community meetings is ‘I’ve never seen someone biking, so why are we building all these bike lanes?’ And my response to that is that, like many other North American cities, we have designed our system around driving, and that’s been at the expense of these other modes of transportation,” said Griepenburg.

But ultimately, working through these challenges is worth it. Petaluma officials and local advocates say the city’s investments in bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure provide residents with additional transportation options while supporting broader traffic safety goals. School drop-offs and pickups become more pleasant with fewer cars. Kids who bike or walk to school get to interact with their neighbors. Families who live further away and need cars will have less traffic to deal with.

“The irony is, all these things we’re talking about make it safer to drive a car too,” said Spindel. “While we talk about cyclists and pedestrians getting hurt, way more drivers are hurt and killed every day.”

“That doesn’t mean we are trying to force people out of their cars,” said Griepenburg. “We want to improve people’s mobility options so that if they are interested in walking or biking, they’re able to do so.”

The city of Petaluma received a 2026 Helen Putnam Award of Excellence in the Public Works, Infrastructure, Transportation category. For more information about the award program, visit calcities.org/helen-putnam-award-for-excellence.