Because I support peoples' right to walk, bike and roll safely on our City's streets, I urge you to allocate funding to lower the City of Ithaca's speed limit to 25 mph. 

The City of Ithaca is home to slower, more walkable and bikeable streets, but also some streets with dangerously fast speeds. Tragically, the rates of traffic fatalities in our country increased dramatically between 2009 and 2021, with pedestrians and bicyclists an increasing share of those deaths. 

Hopefully, we know that reduced motor vehicle speeds lower the likelihood of injury or fatality in the case of a collision with a pedestrian. Evidence from other cities demonstrates that lower speed limits result in reduced motor vehicle speeds, even without additional enforcement. In 2019, a City Engineering Department conducted a city-wide evaluation of the crash trends for a 10-year period using a state-wide database and found a record of 11,525 crashes, 1,393 (12%) injury crashes, 178 (1.5%) severe injury crashes and 5 fatalities, strongly suggesting the need to lower Ithaca's city-wide speed limit, along with other measures to protect vulnerable road users. 

For these reasons, Ithaca’s Common Council passed a resolution – both in 2019 and again in 2022 -- calling on our state legislators to pass state legislation allowing Upstate municipalities like Ithaca to lower the speed limit to 25 mph, and Ithaca's Acting Mayor wrote to the Governor urging her to sign the bill. Now that this bill has become state law and Ithaca has the option, I call on the City's elected officials to swiftly allocate the local funding necessary to implement 25 mph for Ithaca, preventing serious injuries and saving lives.