Somerville Went Four Years Without a Traffic Death. Burlington Has the Same Playbook and a Fraction of the Staff
The difference is that Somerville put recurring money and people behind the playbook.
Somerville, Massachusetts, is the densest city in New England, and nobody has died in a traffic crash on its streets since 2022. Serious crashes there fell by half in 2025. The Boston Globe reported the four-year record last week, following coverage in Governing and the Christian Science Monitor this summer.
Ask Somerville officials how, and they do not describe a breakthrough. They describe a playbook: speed humps, raised crosswalks, curb extensions that shorten the distance a person on foot is exposed, bus lanes, an expanding network of bike lanes physically separated from traffic, and more than 500 designated safety zones, stretches of street posted at 20 mph instead of the citywide 25. Officials there are candid that none of it is original. It is close to the same playbook Hoboken, New Jersey, used to go more than nine years without a traffic death.
It is also, almost item for item, the playbook Burlington adopted last year.
Burlington Already Has the Playbook
On June 16, 2025, the Burlington City Council adopted the planBTV Walk Bike Safety Action Plan. The document is not a statement of aspiration. It is a construction list with arithmetic attached.
For each recommended fix, the plan carries a crash modification factor — a published multiplier, drawn from federal research, estimating how much a given treatment cuts crashes. Separated bike lanes carry a factor that works out to a reduction of roughly 45 percent. Every other recommended treatment in the plan carries one too.
The plan then applies those multipliers to Burlington’s actual crash history, street by street, and produces a ten-year projected crash reduction for each project. It names ten focal corridors — the arterial streets, meaning the high-volume through routes, where most of Burlington’s serious crashes happen — and ranks them. It sets a target: significantly reduce fatalities and serious injuries by 2035. The plan does not attach a number to “significantly.”
Burlington also has the tools to move fast. The city’s Quick Build standards, on the books since 2017, exist specifically to let public works install low-cost, adjustable street changes meant to stay in place up to five years, without waiting for a full reconstruction. That is the same category of work Somerville has been doing at volume.
The Ledger
The Safety Action Plan includes something most plans leave out: an audit of the previous plan. Measured against the roughly 200 projects identified in the 2017 planBTV Walk Bike Plan, here is where Burlington stood as of winter 2025, eight years in:
Bikeways: 17.6 of 28 targeted miles built. That is real progress — about 63 percent.
Intersections: 5 of the 20-plus priority intersection projects completed. Nine more have interim improvements in place; six remain planned.
New sidewalk: 0.16 of 3.4 targeted miles built. Under five percent. The city does reconstruct three to four miles of existing sidewalk a year, but new sidewalk — the kind that closes a gap where people currently walk in the road — has barely moved.
That is not a city doing nothing. It is a city that has moved steadily on bikeways, unevenly on intersections, and barely at all on new sidewalk.
What Somerville Bought That Burlington Didn’t
The difference between the two cities is not knowledge. Both have the same countermeasures written down. The difference is that Somerville put recurring money and people behind the playbook.
Since 2018, according to Governing’s reporting, Somerville has added more than a dozen staff across mobility, engineering, parking, and public works — the people who design projects, answer complaints, and ran roughly 120 community meetings and events in 2025. Its separated bike lane expansion, 21 miles, is projected at close to $10 million over four years. Normalized:
About $475,000 per mile.
About $2.5 million a year.
About $30 per resident per year, in a city of 81,000.
That is a recurring line item, not a landmark project. It is the municipal equivalent of a subscription.
Burlington’s constraint runs the other way. When the city lowered its downtown speed limit to 20 mph in October 2025, its public works director told Seven Days that the change would not be paired with heavier traffic enforcement, because the police department is too short-staffed for it. The city said it would rely on street design instead. Somerville is doing both, and hired to do both.
The One Thing Vermont Law Does Block
Under 23 V.S.A. § 1007, a Vermont municipality may set its own speed limits based on an engineering and traffic study, but cannot post below 25 mph. The single exception, in subsection (g), is for downtown development districts formally designated by the state. That subsection is the route Burlington took: the city’s plan lists the establishment of a Downtown Slow Zone, with a 20 mph limit, among the actions it has completed since 2017. Compass reported on the effort to lift that floor in February; the legislature adjourned without moving it.
Burlington’s own plan, though, does not identify speed as the city’s central problem. The plan’s crash analysis found that speed was not a significant factor in pedestrian and bicycle injuries — in nearly 60 percent of those injury crashes, the maximum vehicle speed was 10 mph or less. Among serious crashes involving vehicles only, 42 percent occurred at 25 mph or under. The plan’s summary of findings leads with how rarely excessive speed and red-light running appear in Burlington’s serious crashes at all.
Vermont’s speed floor is a real limit on what Vermont cities may do. It is not the reason Burlington’s numbers look the way they do.
What Burlington’s Numbers Actually Say
Between 2014 and 2023, Burlington recorded 6 fatal crashes and 85 serious injury crashes. One of the people killed was a pedestrian; no bicyclists died in that decade. Twenty-six pedestrians and eleven cyclists were seriously injured.
The distinguishing figure is the share: more than 40 percent of Burlington’s most severe crashes involved someone walking or biking, against about 11 percent statewide. Vermont’s Vulnerable Roadway Users assessment named Burlington one of ten high-risk communities in the state.
What the plan found driving those crashes is not speeding drivers on open road. It is conflict points — informal midblock crossings where no crosswalk exists, drivers failing to yield while completing turns, signalized intersections where a turning vehicle and a person crossing arrive at the same place at the same moment. Nearly half of serious pedestrian crashes happened at informal midblock crossings. Nearly three-quarters of the serious crashes happened on arterial streets.
That diagnosis points squarely at the two categories where Burlington’s construction ledger is thinnest: intersection projects and new sidewalk.
Pine Street is the plan’s third-ranked focal corridor of ten. Shiloh Skalka was killed there at Locust this summer. The plan credits Pine Street with recent work — bike lanes, raised crossings, traffic calming, a shared-use path between Kilburn and Lakeside — and notes those improvements are too recent to appear in the crash data. Of the three additional Pine Street projects the plan recommends, two are classified long-term.
Where the Comparison Breaks
Somerville is about 81,000 people in roughly four square miles. Burlington is about 44,500 in roughly ten and a half, with highway approaches Somerville has no equivalent of. Density is much of why design changes bite there.
And four fatality-free years in a city of 81,000 is partly a small number. The claim that holds up is the trend in serious injuries, not the zero.
What to Watch
Burlington’s plan obligates the city to check its own work. Staff are to review fatalities, serious injuries, and non-motorist crashes annually, publish a written assessment, and maintain a public crash dashboard. That report is the document to read when it appears.
Adopting the plan also made Burlington eligible to apply for federal Safe Streets and Roads for All implementation grants — the main federal money for building this kind of work — which require a 20 percent local match. Whether the city applies, and for which corridors, is the near-term signal of whether the playbook becomes construction.
The playbook is written. Somerville’s four years suggest it works. What Somerville also demonstrates is that the playbook does not install itself.