Press Releases

For Immediate Release

New Report Shows Bay Area Travel Growing Safer

Fatal/Injury Crashes Fall for Fourth Straight Year

Contact:

John Goodwin, MTC, 510.817.5862
Joe Curley, MTC, 510.817.5847

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 20, 2005. . . The Bay Area is steadily becoming a safer place for motorists and pedestrians alike. Across the nine-county region, the number of reported auto and truck collisions that resulted in death or injury — and the number of motor vehicle collisions involving pedestrians — dropped for the fourth straight year in 2004. The number of injury/fatal vehicle collisions fell by 5 percent to just under 34,000 while the number of collisions involving pedestrians dipped by 3 percent to fewer than 2,800. And while the number of auto accidents involving bicyclists rose 5 percent last year to nearly 2,400, this figure is still 16 percent below the 2000 tally.

These statistics and dozens of other key indicators can be found in Bay Area Transportation: State of the System 2005, a digest of data on the performance of the region's transportation network and facilities produced annually by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and Caltrans District 4. In addition to safety statistics and the 2004 freeway congestion data (which was released by MTC and Caltrans in September 2005), the State of the System 2005 report features previously unreleased data about pavement conditions, transit ridership and reliability, measures of air travel and goods movement, and much more.

Using easy-to-understand tables, graphs and maps, State of the System 2005 details and briefly comments on how the Bay Area transportation network performed in 2004 (the last full year for which data are available), and discusses trends going back up to five years. Taken together, the many pieces of data paint a comprehensive picture of the state of transportation throughout the region.

In its assessment of pavement conditions on local streets and roads, the State of the System 2005 report includes a ranking of Bay Area cities and counties based on each jurisdiction's pavement condition index (PCI) score. MTC uses a scale of 0 to 100 to measure pavement quality and assigns a “very good” rating for PCI scores of 75 or higher. Not surprisingly, the best pavement conditions typically are found in newer communities where streets and roads have not yet been subjected to decades of weather and heavy traffic. Topping the Bay Area pavement rankings for 2004 was the eastern Contra Costa County city of Brentwood, which registered an average PCI score of 87. The lowest-rated streets and roads were found in unincorporated Sonoma County, which had a ”poor” pavement rating and an average PCI score of 44.

Due to a new stream of revenue from the Measure M transportation sales tax approved by Sonoma County voters in November 2004, motorists from Sea Ranch to Sears Point can look forward to significant investment in pavement upgrades during the months ahead. Expenditure plans for the transportation sales taxes approved in 2004 by voters in Contra Costa, Marin and San Mateo counties made local street and road maintenance a high priority as well. A half-cent transportation sales tax being considered for the June 2006 ballot in Napa County also would direct much of the new revenue to local streets and roads.

State of the System 2005 can be found on the MTC Web site at: www.mtc.ca.gov/library/state_of_the_system/. Printed copies of the report will be available free of charge in early 2006 and may be ordered from the MTC Library by e-mail (library@mtc.ca.gov) or by phone (510.817.5836).

MTC is the regional transportation planning, financing, and coordinating agency for the San Francisco Bay Area. Caltrans District 4 is the operating arm of the California Department of Transportation for the same nine-county region. Caltrans is responsible for the planning, design, construction, maintenance and operation of the California highway system, and is the state’s overall manager of interregional transportation services.

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