State College to Host Open House for Initiative to Make Borough Roads Safer

State College will welcome public input this month for an initiative aimed at eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries.

An open house for the borough’s Vision Zero planning will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 21 in room 201 of the State College Municipal Building. Community members can stop by any time during the open house to offer their feedback.

Vision Zero is an international strategy to promote safe, equitable mobility that eliminates traffic fatalities and severe injuries.

According to PennDOT data, State College Borough had 866 reportable crashes between 2021-2025, including 420 with injuries, 10 with serious injuries and two with fatalities,

State College’s Vision Zero planning, supported by a federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant, builds on the Next Generation Safety and Mobility Plan adopted in 2024 as a guide for projects that improve pedestrian access, bicycling, transit and micromobility.

The borough’s Vision Zero Action Plan will be developed with the goal of creating a roadmap for improving roadway safety and reducing dangerous conditions throughout State College, according to its Vision Zero website.

Planning started with a detailed safety analysis identifying streets that have the highest frequency of severe crashes. The borough will then use the Federal Highway Administration’s Safe System Approach to identify proven safety countermeasures for specific locations and systemic safety treatments, recommend policies, education and outreach strategies to improve safety, and establish an actionable framework for implementing recommendations.

According to the FHWA, the Safe System approach “involves anticipating human mistakes by designing and managing road infrastructure to keep the risk of a mistake low; and when a mistake leads to a crash, the impact on the human body doesn’t result in a fatality or serious injury.” It is predicated on principles that traffic deaths and serious injuries are preventable and that streets must be designed to accommodate human error.

Planning for State College’s Vision Zero initiative began over the summer. A draft plan is expected to be presented to the Transportation Commission and Borough Council in the spring of 2027.

“The Vision Zero Action Plan is more than a technical document; it is a commitment to everyone who lives, works, studies, and travels in the Borough of State College,” the borough wrote on its Vision Zero site. “The Vision Zero Plan will address the distinct safety needs of a college town, where students are a major part of daily travel and where high multimodal activity, a vibrant downtown, strong transit demand, and state-owned corridors must safely accommodate many users.”