This New Jersey city achieved zero traffic deaths. Could it be a model for Santa Cruz?
The story was originally published by the Santa Cruz Local with support from our 2025 California Health Equity Fellowship.
Pedestrians cross 11th Street in Hoboken, N.J., where plastic flexible posts prevent vehicles from parking next to the crosswalk, in July.
(Reena Rose Sibayan — Santa Cruz Local)
SANTA CRUZ >> Nearly 3,000 miles from Santa Cruz, a city about the same population, compressed into about 1 square mile, bustles with activity. Each weekday morning, thousands of businesspeople, families and students flow from downtown homes and bus stops towards a ferry and metro station. Others criss-cross streets lined with mid-rise buildings and small shops, barely glancing at approaching cars.
Like Santa Cruz, Hoboken, New Jersey made a pledge in 2019 to eliminate all traffic deaths. Unlike Santa Cruz, and nearly all other cities in the nation that have tried, Hoboken succeeded. No pedestrian, cyclist or driver has died in a crash in Hoboken since January 2017. In the same eight year period, 22 people have died in crashes in Santa Cruz, including 11 pedestrians and two cyclists.
Hoboken is a uniform grid of narrow streets a ferry ride from Manhattan— “the urban planner’s dream,” said Santa Cruz Transportation Manager Matt Starkey. It’s an unlikely model for Santa Cruz’s 16-square-mile tangle of highways, arterials and cul-de-sacs.
But the low-cost strategies for street safety Hoboken has used could be a template for Santa Cruz to get closer to its safety goals.
Push for change
Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla talks with Transportation and Parking Director Steve Weber.
(Reena Rose Sibayan — Santa Cruz Local)
A decade ago, Hoboken’s main drag on Washington Street looked very different from today’s pedestrian-friendly design: dark brick crosswalks, no pedestrian walk signals and cars that frequently parked all the way up to the intersections.
“You had to physically go into the flow of traffic to see if the light was red or green,” said Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla. “That was even more dangerous when I had a child, and I was really pushing a baby stroller into the middle of the street, just to know whether it was safe.” As a city council member, Bhalla in 2016 approved a comprehensive redesign of the street as part of a water main repair.
The death of an 89-year old woman hit by a car while crossing the street in 2015 spurred Bhalla to prioritize street safety.
Soon after Bhalla took office as mayor in 2018, the city joined Vision Zero, a nation-wide effort to eliminate traffic deaths, and drafted a long-term plan to overhaul street designs, traffic enforcement, and city vehicles.
Hoboken’s plan contains a lot of strategies Santa Cruz is already doing, including using street repaving as an opportunity to add new bike lanes and safer crosswalks, and requiring new housing developments to pay for street improvements like pedestrian paths and bike lanes on or next to their property. But those efforts can be costly and take years to build.
Santa Cruz is in the process of updating its Active Transportation Plan for street safety improvements first developed in 2017. There are some low-cost strategies Hoboken relies on that Santa Cruz could ramp up: plastic posts, tweaked signal settings and new signs.
Trading parking for safety
Empty parking spots are hard to find in Downtown Hoboken.
(Reena Rose Sibayan — Santa Cruz Local)
At nearly every intersection in Hoboken, a car-sized section of road next to the curb is blocked off with white paint and two plastic posts.
These areas play a huge role in reducing pedestrian deaths, said Steve Weber, Hoboken’s transportation and parking director.
These posts “daylight” intersections by making it easier for drivers to see crossing pedestrians, he said. Parking next to an intersection is illegal in New Jersey, but in a city with limited street parking, many people weren’t easily deterred by the threat of tickets.
California voters adopted a similar law that went into effect Jan. 1. It bans parking within 20 feet of an intersection, but many curb corners in the city of Santa Cruz and throughout the state remain unpainted. Some intersections in Santa Cruz are daylit with plastic posts or rain gardens, and Starkey said the city’s aiming to add more.
Hoboken city staff have been daylighting intersections block-by-block over the past seven years, but not without pushback. Next to an Italian deli, a car with a disabled placard was parked over the paint, and a torn-off post lay dented on the sidewalk. A few blocks over, Best Dry Cleaners owner Hay Tad said her customers used to briefly park on the corner to pick up or drop off clothes. Since the corner next to her store was daylighted in June, they have complained about having to park blocks away for a simple errand.
Bhalla said over the years he’s been accused of “waging a war on cars,” which he denies. Hoboken, like many dense cities, has too many cars and not enough parking, he said.
Instead of trying to keep pace with demand by prioritizing street parking, Hoboken’s policies nudge people away from car travel. The city has added bikeshare stations similar to Bcycle, and runs a free shuttle around the city, much like an expanded version of the Santa Cruzer shuttle between Downtown and the wharf.
Daylighting intersections can reduce the chance of pedestrian crashes by 30%, according to the Federal Highway Safety Administration. “Add that up around the city, and that makes a real big, meaningful difference,” he said.
Santa Cruz adds daylighting barriers to intersections during construction projects and sometimes at residents’ request, Starkey said.
With longer blocks and more parking spaces, daylighting in Santa Cruz likely won’t provoke a lot of pushback from people concerned about parking availability. Although when city staff propose new street designs, parking tends to be one of the biggest concerns, he said. “That’s a big hang up that I think we have in the U.S. in general,” he said.
On major roads, like Soquel Avenue, and Ocean, Water and Laurel streets, “we’re still providing parking space there, where actually we should think about how we use that space to make the roadway feel safe,” he said.
Reducing street parking could give more room for new or expanded bike lanes, or new turning lanes for cars, he said.
Giving pedestrians more time
Pedestrians cross Washington Street in Hoboken, N.J. The traffic signal gives pedestrians a 7-second head start to cross.
(Reena Rose Sibayan)
In many intersections in Santa Cruz there are stoplights for cars and walk lights for pedestrians, with both changing simultaneously to let people walk and drive in parallel across the street. But in Hoboken, pedestrians have a head start, giving them time to clear the way of vehicles turning right.
These “leading pedestrian intervals” can reduce pedestrian crashes by 60%, according to the highway safety administration. They don’t require costly new equipment, just reprogramming of existing signals.
Within the city of Santa Cruz, only Mission Street has leading pedestrian intervals, Starkey said.
“It’s in our long laundry list of good ideas,” Starkey said. “It’s a good, relatively quick and cheap idea.”
Speed limits
A citywide 20 mph speed limit means that cyclists and pedestrians hit by cars are less likely to die.
(Reena Rose Sibayan — Santa Cruz Local)
The biggest factor in whether a pedestrian or cyclist survives a crash is speed — and small changes can make a huge difference. Pedestrians hit by a car driving 20 mph have an 8% chance of dying, compared to 20% at 30 mph.
In 2022, Hoboken lowered speed limits to 20 mph on most streets, and 15 mph near schools.
“We still have, like, 120 crash injuries every year, but very few of those are serious injuries,” said Weber, the Hoboken transportation planner.
A universal 20 mph limit likely isn’t viable in Santa Cruz, said Weber, who has visited the area several times. But he said it could be useful in denser areas like Beach Flats and Downtown.
Over the years, speed limits in Santa Cruz, and across California, have crept up to comply with state laws. To enforce speed limits with radar guns, speed limits must be 85% the average speed of traffic.
A 2021 state law softened that rule and in some cases, let local governments reduce speed limits by 5 mph. Starkey said staff may recommend reducing speed limits in some parts of the city as part of the updated transportation plan.
The city’s long-term goal should be to design streets so people naturally drive more slowly, said Matt Miller, director of mobility transformation for Santa Cruz-based nonprofit Ecology Action. But those projects take years — and thousands or millions of dollars — to design and build.
“In the meantime, if you post the speed limit lower” and strategically issue speeding traffic tickets so “people get the point that it actually is a slower street, now it seems like a pretty fast, relatively low-cost implementation strategy,” he said.
The Pacific Ocean is a far cry from the Hudson River. But in both cities, children walk home from school, delivery bikes race across town, and drivers circle downtown in search of parking. All of them trying to get home safe.