Raleigh on Monday dropped a sprawling Safe Streets for All Comprehensive Safety Action Plan, clocking in at more than 500 pages, that spells out how the city wants to curb traffic deaths and serious injuries with a mix of quick fixes and longer-term policy changes. The plan maps high-risk intersections and busy corridors, calling out the top locations where near-term projects could cut down on severe crashes. Neighbors and officials say the work runs the gamut from tweaking traffic signals to full-on corridor redesigns.
The CSAP sets an explicit target to cut fatal and serious-injury crashes by 25% every five years, with the long game of eliminating them entirely by 2045, according to the City of Raleigh. Built with federal Safe Streets and Roads for All planning funds, the report leans on crash data and public feedback to zero in on low-cost, high-impact changes the city can roll out relatively quickly.
One of the top-ten locations flagged for immediate attention is the intersection of Hillsborough Street and North Boylan Avenue, and the more-than-500-page plan also puts New Bern Avenue on the list of priority corridors. Pedestrian Keith Moses told ABC11, "I feel like there could be a lot more improvements," pointing to short signal timing, frequent honking and regular conflicts. City staff say those hotspot lists came from cross-checking crash history, traffic volume and what they heard from residents.
Planned upgrades the city wants first
The action plan leans heavily on quick-build engineering: sidewalks, raised or painted medians, high-visibility crosswalks, better lighting and signal-timing adjustments that can be put in place without years of design work, the City of Raleigh says. Many of those physical changes are meant to be paired with targeted outreach and enforcement focused on speeding and other dangerous driving behaviors.
Numbers that drove the effort
Raleigh’s analysis shows that crashes involving people walking or biking are more than four times as likely to end in serious injury or death, and between 2019 and 2023 the city logged roughly 185 fatal crashes and 905 serious-injury crashes for a total of nearly 1,100 severe incidents, as reported by ABC11. Those numbers anchor the hotspot mapping and help explain why intersections, which account for a big share of serious crashes, are front and center in the early work.
What comes next and how it will move
City leaders are pitching the plan as a multi-year roadmap rather than a construction calendar, meaning projects will move forward as money becomes available and as the city can coordinate with state partners. Raleigh plans to chase federal, state and local funding for the highest-priority fixes. Early CSAP work was covered by a $1 million SS4A planning grant, and the development process featured public meetings and an interactive comment map, a community feedback push earlier detailed in community feedback coverage.
City staff say the plan will steer safety spending for years, with regular progress reports to show whether a mix of engineering, education and enforcement is actually reducing severe crashes. For neighbors, the real verdict will come down to whether crossings feel safer and whether those serious crash numbers finally start to drop.
