Subject: Support for Item 5.1 2025 Vision Zero Action Plan
Dear Honorable Mayor and City Councilmembers,
My name is Rachel Sussman and I am a District 6 resident in San Jose as well as a family medicine doctor practicing here in San Jose, and a mom of three kids who attend San Jose public schools. I am writing to strongly urge the City Council to approve and adopt the 2025 Vision Zero Plan with the added recommendations on Memorandum from Mayor Mahan, Vice Mayor Foley, and Councilmembers Campos, Ortiz & Doan.
In particular, I appreciate the focus on rolling out more quick-build options for improving the safety of our streets in San Jose. Every morning, my 3 kids and I bike and walk to school and I bike to work. And every day, there are moments when I feel threatened by the speed and behavior of passing cars, and I fear for my children’s safety as well. However, I know the numerous benefits to both us and our community of having as many people as possible out walking and biking on our streets. Biking and walking keeps us healthier, helps build social ties with our community when we see neighbors and wave and stop to chat, and keeps our environment a little cleaner. So we make the choice to continue because for us the benefits are greater than the risks. But not everyone sees the balance this way, and making it safer to walk and bike would help more people make the healthier choice.
In my work taking care of patients of all ages, one of my most frequent recommendations is to decrease the amount of time they are sitting and increase the amount of time they are active.
Becoming more active by walking and biking helps to combat some of the most common sources of illness in our society: anxiety and depression stemming both from a lack of activity and a lack of connection in the community, and chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. And yet when I make this recommendation for my patients, one of the most common replies is “but it doesn’t feel safe”. It doesn’t need to be this way.
As a family doctor in the county system, I am used to doing what needs to be done with limited resources to keep my patients safe. If the ideal form of insulin is not covered for my diabetic patient, I do not shrug and say “too bad, guess her sugars are going to go high.” Instead, I come up with a compromise treatment using a cheaper form of insulin – a good-enough way to control blood sugars that is affordable on the patient’s budget.
Similarly, even if the ideal fixes for street safety are out of reach due to budget or time, then the city still has a duty to keep its citizens safe and to support wellness in our community by finding efficient, good-enough solutions to make our streets safer, and rolling them out quickly.
Several months ago, a Lincoln High School freshman was walking back at dusk from playing football and crossing the street in a crosswalk a block from my home, when he was hit by a car and injured to the point of requiring a wheelchair for weeks. A family medicine doctor from my clinic who was biking home from work stopped to care for him until the ambulance arrived.
Quick-build tools to decrease speed near that intersection and increase the visibility of the crosswalk may well have prevented this near-tragedy. We should keep in mind that behind every death statistic lie multiple stories of lives forever changed by near-miss accidents. Not only was a young man traumatized by being flipped onto a car windshield, but the doctor who saw the accident and stopped to help has been scared to bike to work ever since.
Please approve and adopt the 2025 Vision Zero Plan with the added recommendations on Memorandum from Mayor Mahan, Vice Mayor Foley, and Councilmembers Campos, Ortiz & Doan.
Thank you,
Dr Rachel Sussman
Family Medicine Physician at Stanford-O’Connor Family Medicine Residency Program in San Jose