Pictures of a new sign at Pine and Summit

The City of Seattle now has a Chief Transportation Safety Officer, a new role hoped to help make sure the city’s street and sidewalk projects are planned with pedestrian, bicyclist, and driver safety in mind.

Seattle Department of Transportation director Greg Spotts has promoted City Traffic Engineer Venu Nemani to the position.

“The role of a Chief Transportation Safety Officer is to elevate and prioritize safety in all our policies, projects, and programs,” Nemani said in a statement. “It is the responsibility of this role to embed safety thinking at all levels of SDOT and lead with safety. It is important because in our recent Top to Bottom review we learned that decision making around safety can be confusing and dispersed. It will be my responsibility to provide that direction to all projects and programs and be that final voice for safety in the department.”

The move follows efforts by Spotts to reshape SDOT as it has struggled with safety goals and ongoing traffic and transit woes. In addition to larger projects that have been in the works for years, SDOT under Spotts has picked up the pace on smaller efforts to make streets safer including new 4-way stops up and down the Pike/Pine corridor.

In the announcement on the new role, SDOT says the need for the new officer emerged from examination of the city’s Vision Zero goals and findings that there was “confusion within the department on who approved safety measures, where they should be included in planning and projects, and how we measure their effectiveness.”

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