San Diego needs to commit to Vision Zero: No more road deaths, injuries or fear of traffic. Image: Transportation Alternatives
BikeSD’s executive director, Samantha Ollinger, and I traveled to New York City this past weekend to attend the first Vision Zero Symposium for Cities. This symposium was organized by Transportation Alernatives, NYC’s very effective transportation advocacy group. San Diego was well represented as Beryl Forman (El Cajon Business Improvement), Liz Studebaker (City of San Diego Economic Development Department, business improvement district advocate), and Kathleen Ferrier (Circulate San Diego policy manager) also attended.
Vision Zero is a civic, public commitment to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries within a specific time period. The concept originated in Sweden in the 1970′s, when Sweden decided that the number of traffic deaths was too high. As a result, Sweden made a conscious decision to base every transportation design, construction and enforcement decision around a basic premise: “will it help reduce Sweden’s total traffic deaths to zero?”
Sweden’s program is a model for the rest of the world: only three of every 100,000 Swedes die in crashes each year, compared to 5.5 deaths per 100,000 across the European Union, and 11.4 deaths in the United States. Sweden’s roads are the safest in the world.
As noted above, the United States has over three times as many per capita fatalities. However, certain cities are starting to catch on, as Vision Zero has been adopted by a number of U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles – all of which have committed to eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries within 10 years.
Speakers at the Symposium included Janette Sadik-Kahn, former New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner (2007-2013) who oversaw the construction of many pedestrian plazas, moved the Department of Transportation into the 21st Century in design standards, and implemented New York City’s decade-old Bicycle Master Plan, while adding hundreds of miles of bike lanes.
Another speaker, Peter Norton, an author and University of Virginia professor, was also in attendance. Norton’s book, Fighting Traffic, chronicled the history of the automobile in U.S. cities, noting that before the auto, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. All that changed by the 1930s, when streets became motor thoroughfares where children were uninvited and pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” Norton contends that what happened in our country was not only a physical transformation, but a social and cultural one: before the city could be reconstructed for cars, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged and people did not.
Polly Trottenberg, the current commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, who helped shepherd the City’s new 25 MPH default speed limit, Ben Fried, editor and chief of Streetsblog NYC also spoke and moderated panels. Tom Vanderbuilt, author of Traffic, also attended but did not speak. Last but certainly not least, Ellen Foote founding member of Families for Safe Streets spoke. This group is not one any of us want to join, as the members share one thing: they are parents, friends, and relatives of people who have died in traffic violence. Foote’s son, Sam, was killed by a motorist while crossing the Manhattan Bridge in 2007.
Vision Zero is a worthy goal, one that San Diego should embrace, and something we at BikeSD are working to achieve. It is apparent, however, that we far behind the leaders. New York is the clear the leader in the race to zero. The City has been well-served over the years by a committed group of advocates who have pushed their leaders to make their streets more humane and forgiving.
Below are some takeaways from the Symposium:
1. Janette Sadik-Kahn said it best: “If you want to build a safer city, build bike lanes.” People on bikes act as a natural traffic calmer; they enable citizens to see their cities on a human scale and speed – the speed of life. We would add that people on bikes – and pedestrians – naturally make our cities more friendly, humane, and liveable.
2. Political leadership must be cultivated. Only in the rarest of cases is it organically created. New York City is a perfect example: Mayor Bloomberg did not initiate his administration with an eye toward transforming the City; rather, he was pushed by a committed group of advocates and stake-holders to do so. We need to keep that in mind here in San Diego.
3. That said, the New York City group created a sense of urgency, demanding that action had to be taken now. (Over 33,000 people are killed in traffic in the US every year.) The most notable win they have achieved to date is the reduction in the speed limit to 25 MPH. New York benefitted by an almost decade-long effort by various advocates; the changes the Bloomberg Administration made; the election of a supportive mayor, Mayor de Blasio, who in turn hired Trottenberg to lead the way; the eloquence of Foote and Families for Safe Streets. From the accounts we heard, it sounded like the impetus for the 25 mph speed limit law came about after a tragic collision in the last year, or so, in which a young child crossing the street with his father was killed by in an inattentive driver. In short, timing matters.
4. And words matter, too. We need to re-frame the debate away from the notion that traffic fatalities and serious injuries are simply inevitable. These incidents aren’t accidents. They are collisions and crashes. They are preventable by design and culture change. Further, the debate needs to focus in part on the fact that traffic violence has huge consequences to our society. The business community has much to gain by making our city streets safer, more humane, more livable, and forgiving.
5. The people communicating the message matter. The most effective and compelling voices for change are those who have been personally affected by traffic violence.
6. Again to quote Sadik Kahn: “In culture and design, people should no longer be an afterthought, at best, or collateral damage, at worst.” And: “Culture eats policy for lunch.” So we need to work to change the culture. The culture can change – seat belt use went from less than 20% in the early 80s to almost 90% today; the culture around drunk driving and smoking have also changed in the recent past.
7. Our enforcement efforts need to be focused on those that cause the most damage on our streets. That means speeding, inattention, intoxication needs to be the focus, not pedestrians and cyclists.
8. We need to end indifference to death on our streets. The perception of convenience over safety needs to change.
We are mindful that these takeaways are light on specifics. That is the hard work we have ahead. But we left feeling optimistic about the future of the movement and our ability as a culture to change. There have been successes – look to Sweden and Portland (where they reportedly have not had a cyclist fatality in 2 years). We can join the list of great cities doing great things.
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Here is Streetsblog NYC’s take on the symposium, and Streetsblog D.C.’s.