Vision Zero Isn’t Working

Vision Zero Isn’t Working

By The Antiplanner | December 2, 2019 | Follow up, Transportation

An article posted on the Atlantic‘s CityLab
last week documented that many of the cities that have adopted “vision
zero” policies have seen pedestrian fatalities sharply increase. These
cities, notes the article, have “spent hundreds of millions of dollars
in the process, rebuilding streets to calm traffic and reduce driving,
lobbying for speed limit reductions, launching public awareness
campaigns, and retraining police departments.” Yet Chicago, Los Angeles,
and Washington, among others, saw sharp increases in pedestrian and/or
bicycle fatalities after adopting Vision Zero policies.

This won’t be a surprise to Antiplanner readers. As described in Policy Brief #25,
Vision Zero is an overly simplistic strategy that fails to solve the
real problems that are causing pedestrian fatalities to rise.

Vision Zero is based on the observation that pedestrians hit by cars
traveling at high speeds are more likely to die than if the cars are
traveling at low speeds. So Vision Zero’s primary tactic is to reduce
driving speeds. Vision Zero’s secondary goal is to reduce driving period
by making auto travel slower and less desirable compared to the
alternatives. Neither of these are working very well.

As Policy Brief #25 noted, the real problem isn’t speed but design.
The fastest driving speeds are on urban freeways, yet they have the
lowest pedestrian fatality rates because pedestrians are normally
excluded from the freeways. Traffic on one-way streets tends to be
faster than on two-way streets, yet pedestrians suffer fewer accidents
on one-way streets because they only have to worry about traffic coming
from one direction when crossing the streets.

Moreover, simply slowing daytime traffic doesn’t treat another major
problem, which is unsafe behavior. More pedestrians die and the rise in
fatalities is greater during the three-hour period between 3 am and 6 am
than the nine-hour period between 9 am and 6 pm. Most fatalities are
also away from intersections and a high percentage of nighttime
pedestrians who died had alcohol in their bloodstreams. Presumably the
same is true for the drivers, but the data don’t report driver alcohol
levels for pedestrian accidents alone.

Better street lighting, better enforcement of driving under the
influence laws, and policies aimed at discouraging people from crossing
the streets outside of designated crosswalks, especially at night, would
be more successful at reducing fatalities than increasing traffic
congestion during rush hours, which is really what Vision Zero is all
about.

We can say for certain that Vision Zero’s efforts to reduce driving
have failed. Chicago and Los Angeles were the first major cities to
adopt Vision Zero goals in 2012. Since then, per capita driving in
Chicago has grown by more than 5 percent while in Los Angeles it has
grown more than 2 percent.

For decades, traffic engineers followed a tried-and-true formula for
reducing auto fatalities: improve roadway designs in ways that reduce
the number and impact of accidents. Vision Zero has diverted cities from
that formula in an overt anti-auto strategy that sometimes actually
makes streets more dangerous (such as when one-way streets are converted
to two-way operation). So it is no surprise that Vision Zero isn’t
working.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is an economist with forty years of experience
critiquing public land, urban, transportation, and other government
plans.