Consider This from NPR - What Vision Zero Has And Hasn't Accomplished

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

More than 100 people are killed on U.S. roads every day — more than 40,000 people a year. So, it seemed bold, if not crazy, when city leaders across the country began to set their sights on eliminating traffic fatalities completely. It has now been 10 years since U.S. cities began to adopt the approach known as Vision Zero. NPR's Joel Rose reports on what has worked and what hasn't.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

A decade ago, on January 15, 2014, Bill de Blasio visited the site of a tragedy. It was the intersection where an 8-year-old boy named Nishat Nahayan was killed by a semi-truck as he walked to school. I stood a few moments ago at Nishat's memorial, and you could feel there how great the sense of loss was. You could feel how different things could have been. You could see exactly where his life was lost and that it didn't have to be that way. de Blasio was just two weeks into his first term as mayor of New York City. He came to give a speech, but first he spoke to the boy's parents. I could tell it was deeply painful, but I also admired that they wanted to tell their story.

They wanted their son's memory to continue and they wanted us to learn and act. de Blasio's speech laid out how New York City would act. He announced that New York would be the first U.S. city to officially adopt a policy called Vision Zero. The goal is literally to reduce fatalities on our roadways to zero. And the core concept is it treats every death as preventable. Vision Zero is a road safety approach first pioneered in Sweden, where it was a big success. After New York signed on to the program, dozens of cities across the U.S. followed. What a beautiful December day in Washington, D.C.

I'm pleased to see you all here, and I'm even more pleased to talk about Vision Zero. San Francisco, Austin, Los Angeles, where the mayor signed the executive directive at a desk set up in the middle of a street. Albuquerque, where Mayor Tim Keller announced the pledge after riding to City Hall for Bike to Work Day. We know that, unfortunately, we are one of the worst cities when it comes to these statistics, which is why we have to take a much stronger, much more proactive approach to dealing with all things pedestrian safety. Consider this. It's been 10 years since Vision Zero first landed in the U.S., and traffic fatalities are up 30 percent nationwide in that time frame. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Sunday, February 4th.

It's Consider This from NPR. And to give you a sense of how ambitious the goal of Vision Zero is, consider where we're starting from. More than 100 people are killed on U.S. roads every day. More than 40,000 a year. A decade of Vision Zero has clearly not eliminated traffic fatalities. But what has it accomplished? NPR's Joel Rose dug into it for us. Queens Boulevard in New York City used to be called the Boulevard of Death, and with good reason.

My son passed away 15 years ago. Lizzie Rahman still puts silk flowers on the white-painted ghost bicycle that marks the spot where her son Asif was killed, riding home from the school where he worked in 2008. I didn't understand why there was no bike lane on this vicious and dangerous and busy road. So Rahman tried to get changes, including a bike lane on Queens Boulevard, a 12-lane speedway where more than 100 pedestrians had been killed. Rahman's efforts stalled for years, and then Mayor Bill de Blasio rolled into office with an ambitious road safety agenda. A few years later, Rahman found herself celebrating a new bike lane on a redesigned Queens Boulevard.

If my son were still alive, he would be riding, biking happily on this street. But he is not here. He gave his blood, his life, and it's not in vain. New York was the first U.S. city to officially adopt Vision Zero, a road safety approach from Europe that believes all roadway fatalities are preventable. The Vision Zero approach acknowledges that some crashes are going to happen, but it aims to make them less deadly by lowering speed limits and making automobile lanes narrower, while adding protections for pedestrians and cyclists. Dozens of other U.S. cities have signed on to Vision Zero.

Even the U.S. Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, considers himself a convert. The thing that really got my attention was seeing how many places had done it. And what that told me is that this can, in fact, be done. Still, a decade after Vision Zero arrived in the U.S., its goal seems more elusive than ever. There have been some successes, including Queens Boulevard. A few cities have seen a remarkable drop in roadway fatalities. But many others have not. Traffic deaths are still rising dramatically in much of the country, including Los Angeles, Denver, and Washington, D.C. Nationwide fatalities are up 30%

since 2014. Even Vision Zero advocates concede the numbers are not great. We've not anywhere in the U.S. truly committed to a real Vision Zero shift. Leah Shahem is the founder of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit in California that works to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries. Shahem says it's easy for cities to adopt Vision Zero as a slogan, but actually changing the status quo on the streets, that's hard. The main reason that communities are failing, there's not the will to make changes that are, in the end, probably going to slow people down driving, and there's probably going to be pushback. That pushback can take a couple of forms.

Often it's local residents who complain about losing parking spaces for a new bike lane, or drivers who already have long commutes and don't want to make them longer. There's no reason we can't be making Vision Zero work in this country, but it's going to take a lot more than press releases and platitudes. It's going to mean really prioritizing safety over speed. Even when cities want to implement Vision Zero, they're often blocked by state rules. Vision Zero is working, but it's working uphill, where other policies in Texas are making it worse still. Jay Crossley is the director of Farm and City, a non-profit in

Austin that's focused on land use and transportation. He says Texas cities like Houston and Dallas are blocked from lowering their own speed limits, even though speeding is a huge factor in traffic fatalities in Texas and nationwide. Meanwhile, Crossley says the state is busy adding more lanes to major roads. We're just throwing money into building concrete. And one of the regrettable outcomes is that focusing on speeding up travel is actually very dangerous. Speeding is not the only reason traffic fatalities are up. Drivers are more distracted, cars are bigger and heavier, and therefore more deadly for pedestrians and cyclists.

Still, there are some bright spots. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg notes that traffic fatalities in the U.S. may have peaked. The numbers have been declining slightly for about a year. And the DOT has begun handing out billions of dollars in grants to redesign dangerous streets and intersections. Just about every community knows where their trouble spots are. What they've been seeking is the support on how to address those trouble spots, to follow the data, follow the dots on these awful maps that show you where all the fatalities and injuries are. And there are a few places in the U.S. where Vision Zero does seem to be working.

You're in front of City Hall and you see, you know, protected bike lanes. Stephen Fulop is the mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey. He's describing a street that's been redesigned with tables for outdoor dining and a protected bike lane. For a full year, Jersey City had zero fatalities on streets that it controls. It's one of a handful of cities around the U.S. that can make that claim, along with neighboring Hoboken and Edina, Minnesota. Fulop says it takes a lot more than a press release.

If you just do a resolution and say, we are supporting Vision Zero, you could expect no results from that. You've got to really be dedicated to it. But if you are committed to it, you will save lives. We would go out there and paint basically this curb extension that you see here. Barkha Patel is the director of infrastructure for Jersey City. She says the city adopted the tactics of what's called guerrilla urbanism, redesigning intersections and extending the curb toward the middle of the street using just orange traffic cones and paint

at first. It's the city itself saying we have to be very, very flexible and nimble and treat our streets as living, breathing things that are not just static. We can't treat our transportation problems like things that require years and years of planning and millions of dollars. Sometimes there was opposition from local residents, Patel says, but it helped that people could see the changes in action immediately. Last year, Jersey City saw a small uptick in fatalities, though only on streets that haven't been redesigned yet. We haven't gotten to every single high-injury street that we need to, but the streets where we have made improvements, we haven't seen any of the same types of crashes

or any of the fatalities. And so when we have a year like this, it sort of helps ground us to say we know what works. After 10 years of Vision Zero in the U.S., supporters say we do know more than ever about what works. But the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities still feels far away. NPR's Joel Rose in Jersey City, New Jersey. This episode was produced by Connor Donovan and Megan Lim with audio engineering by Gilly Moon. It was edited by Russell Lewis and Sammy Gettigan, who's also our executive producer.

And before we go, one more piece of news. And this one is about our show. You can now support this podcast by signing up for Consider This Plus. You get to hear every episode without messages from sponsors, which means you'll hear what you need to know in even less time. And your contribution will help make the work of NPR journalists possible. You can sign up on our show page in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org, and that link can be found in our episode notes. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Scott Detrow.