COCOA, Fla. — Serious and sometime fatal wrecks can feel like just another fact that comes with driving -- an unfortunate, but occasional risk of being on the road.

But the City of Cocoa took a key step against that Tuesday, refusing to accept that as another fact of life.

The city passed a resolution that commits it to an initiative called “Vision Zero.” The goal is to eliminate wrecks that involve serious injury or death within the city limits. 

The resolution says the city will form a Vision Zero Safety Committee that will “advise the City Council on the development and implementation of a Vision Zero Safety Action Plan” and to “develop assurances against racial profiling and targeting as it pertains to Vision Zero enforcement and to ensure that communities of color, police and community leadership are included in the decision-making and development of enforcement plans or policies.” 

“It will be different members of our staff that have key expertise in certain areas,” City of Cocoa spokesperson Samantha Senger said.

The project is part of a countywide movement of the same name, spearheaded by the Space Coast Transportation Planning Organization.

In October 2020, the TPO issued its own action plan that outlines several key areas that need to be addressed. 

In addressing equity in the plan, it identified areas dubbed "Communities of Concern," based on data from 2014 through 2018.

Those are defined as “areas where 40 percent or more of residents have family or individual incomes less than 185 percent of the federal poverty threshold and 50 percent or more are people of color. Communities of Concern census tracts are at the lower end in number of crashes per 1,000 residents, however they are adjacent to tracts that are on the higher end.”

Those areas, highlighted in purple, include spots in Cocoa. 

The action plan also identifies high injury networks based on modes of transportation. The data pointed to 25 intersections of concern that pertained to crashes involving vehicles. The top two crash intersections both fall within Cocoa at the intersections of Clearlake at Rosetine and where I-95 meets State Road 524. 

One of the top five high injury networks for pedestrians also lies within Cocoa at the intersection of State Road 520 and U.S. 1.

For both the City of Cocoa and the Space Coast TPO, education will be a big part of this undertaking, especially when it comes to young drivers. 

The 15- to 24-year age group represents the largest of those involved in fatal and severe crashes, the data shows. 

While Cocoa is the first municipality to sign a resolution undertaking this endeavor, Satellite Beach already has a committee taking on some of this work and has started making strides in its part of Brevard County, Kim Smith of the TPO says.

“We couldn’t do this without our community partners,” she says.