Vision Zero: A critical goal to prevent road fatalities
To paraphrase author Tom Vanderbilt, our nation’s traffic fatality rates are not a collection of “accidents,” but a longstanding public health crisis with far reaching impacts for all Americans. And while traffic crashes continue to decline, approximately 35,000 Americans are still killed each year. To put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurring every month on our nation’s roadways, with nowhere near the commensurate response from our nation’s leaders.
When it comes to traffic violence, the United States has clearly developed a “culture of acceptance,” which fails to appropriately address a safety record on par with some of the former Soviet Republics.
And so it goes in New York City, where someone dies in a traffic crash every 35 hours.
When compared to all other large cities in America, New York City actually experiences the least amount of traffic violence per capita. The city’s connected street network, density, and range of transportation choices are but a few reasons why we New Yorkers enjoy exponentially safer streets than our counterparts in San Antonio, Phoenix or Dallas.
Yet, when compared to peer cities abroad, especially in northern Europe, it’s clear that America’s largest city is not nearly safe enough, or so says an excellent new report from Transportation Alternatives entitled Vision Zero: How Safer Streets in New York City Can Save More Than 100 Lives a Year.
While Vision Zero — zero being the number of traffic crash related deaths desired — rightfully applauds the safety gains achieved in the past decade (30 percent decline in fatalities), it also asserts that the City’s goal of halving traffic fatalities by 2030 is not aggressive enough. According to the report, Paris accomplished the same feat in a mere 6 years.
Aimed at the City’s policymakers and the advocates who continue to push them forward, Vision Zero successfully accomplishes its three principal objectives:
1) To illustrate the critical need to improve street safety in New York City, citing the cost in human terms.
2) To present data and evidence from the research literature that confirms the life-saving benefits of the city’s recent transportation policies.
3) To offer constructive advice about how New York City can build consensus and momentum in order to prevent road fatalities and serious injuries.
And while Vision Zero may focus on New York City, its recommendations may be used to frame policy decisions that recognize a public health catastrophe in need of immediate attention at all scales of government.
To twist the well-known phrase, if Vision Zero must be adopted here — America’s city with the least traffic violence per capita — it certainly must happen everywhere else, too.
Mike Lydon is the Founding Principal of The Street Plans Collaborative
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Great job Mike
Great job Mike!
Evidence is mounting that a critical way to reduce the carnage on our urban, suburban and rural streets is to stop designing them using interstate highway principles. The notion that wider, straighter and faster would make our streets safer caught on the 1960s -- and until recently, no one has researched whether it works. Well, in short, it doesn't, as demonstrated for instance by the work of Eric Dumbaugh at Texas A&M and Reid Ewing at the University of Utah. Even more compelling evidence can be gleaned by reviewing the numbers from the Netherlands, which went from the same per capita fatality rate as the US in 1970, to almost two thirds less in 2008. They did so by putting the breaks on the rush to make streets look like freeways: there are too many cars turning into driveways, too many traffic signals and stop signs, and too many pedestrians trying to cross the streets. Mixing high speed cars with slowing, turning and entering vehicles and pedestrians just doesn't work. If we in America had done what the Dutch did, 23,000 more Americans would have returned home to their families last year; yikes.
New York City's evidence supports the wisdom of reshaping streets to avoid the inevitable collisions resulting from the illusion that high speed flow can co-exist with the role of streets in allowing for connecting with driveways, sidestreets, pedestrians and bicyclists. Check out their data for yourself. Your life, or that of a friend or family member, may depend on it.
Incidents
For starters, start using the term "incident" for "accident" with friends and colleagues. revolutionrickshaws.com
Increasing crashes?
There is an increasing threat from distracted drivers being attracted to interactive computer displays on the dashboard. Players in this are Toyota, Ford, Microsoft, Research in Motion from the two articles I clipped, and I'm sure most automakers will follow. There needs to be some preventive legislation to prohibit dashboard internet access or at least disable it while a car is in motion.
Road safety
This article shows a lack of knowledge of the many efforts being undertaken for road safety, from the Federal Highway Administration and the Transportation Research Board on road safety, to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and auto manufacturers on vehicle safety, the the National Institute for Highway Safety, and insurance companies, etc. It also fails to consider differences among cities, including factors like density, car ownership, emergency medical response, vehicle speed, vehicle type, number of persons per vehicle, age of vehicle, etc. (Age of vehicle because older vehicles tend to have fewer safety features than newer vehicles.) One chart shows NYC as being similar to London in rates, which makes sense. Where are other "comparable cities," like Mexico City, Moscow, Bombay, Rio, Djakarta, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai, etc? Somebody's cherry-picked the data here...Cars can indeed be made safer for occupants, but then they will be much heavier-- and do more damage to the lighter vehicle that is hit. Physics is physics. There are safety problems with the new smaller lighter vehicles. The force of vehicle impacts can be reduced if speed is reduced, but then productivity is reduced also.
Safety
Having repeatedly been a victim or near-victim of the mobile-challenged, I agree with Don Burrell that e-devices should be completely eliminated from cars.
But that misses Mike's point: roads are poorly designed.
Even if all electronic devices were eliminated, the U.S. would still have ludicrously high road fatality rates. This has been true for four decades.
Marc Brenman's comment is off the mark. Mike--and many of us--are well aware of federal efforts to improve road safety. The feds are also improving automobile safety. Yet road fatalities remain persistently high, even when these efforts are accounted for, as they are, implicitly, in the data provided. Fatalities are PARTIALLY a result of "physics is physics" as described by Mr Brenman--who has cherry-picked his choice of subjects by ignoring the effects of physics associated with speed and momentum. These factors include a human factor not included in a simple question of whether or not the airbag deployed. And the human factor (choice of speed, for example) is heavily influenced by ROAD DESIGN. Which is the point of the column.
As for cherry-picking, I say this is irrelevant. It appears that Mike deliberately selected the biggest cities in countries with which the U.S. shares most culturally: the cities of western Europe and Australia, with two east Asian cities thrown in. No listing can be complete in such a brief study. One might just as easily claim that if all of Mr Brenman's cities had been included that the study was "cherry-picked" because it failed to include Dubai, Dhaka, Bangkok, Rome, Athens, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, etc. Perhaps Mr Lydon should have clarified the reasons for his choices.
In his haste to discredit Mr Lydon, Mr Brenman either ignored or didn't read thoroughly enough: Tokyo (on his list of cities that should have been included) WAS included, as was Hong Kong (not on Mr Brenman's list, but two other Chinese cities are).
Clarification
Marc and Cindy,
Just an important point of clarification: I am not the author of the Vision Zero eport. The above article is simply a quick summary/synthesis of the report,which was authored by Transportation Alternatives. The graphs displayed are just two examples of the type of data reviewed in crafting the recommendations made in the report.
Please click through the link to download the research.
Best,
Mike