Mission Zero

By Jay Walljasper

Bridget Driscoll became the first person in history to be hit and killed by a car as she crossed a London street in 1896 to attend a church event. May, her teenaged daughter, narrowly escaped death. The cause of the tragedy was an auto traveling at a "tremendous pace," according to a first-hand witness, "as fast as a good horse could gallop." A jury declared the incident "an accidental death," and there was no public outrage at Driscoll' s life being cut short.

Not much has changed over the past 120 years in how we respond to traffic fatalities. The mounting death toll is viewed as one of those sad facts of life we can' t do much about, like tornadoes or brain aneurysms.

Around the world, more than 1.35 million people die each year in traffic collisions as they walk, bike, or travel in a vehicle. The severity of the problem prompted the United Nations in April 2018 to launch a new global safe streets initiative. In the U.S., the toll is around 35,000 annually. Pedestrian deaths in particular have climbed 35 percent over the past decade. The 2018 death toll for people walking and rolling in wheelchairs was 6,227 — the highest since 1990.

Between 2008 and 2017, nearly 50,000 American pedestrians were killed by vehicles — the equivalent of a jumbo jetliner crashing every month for 10 years with no survivors, according to the new Dangerous By Design report from the National Complete Streets Coalition. The report also documents how older people, people of color, and pedestrians walking in low-income communities stand a significantly higher chance of being killed or seriously injured.

Among the major causes of pedestrian deaths are drivers who are drunk or driving too fast, plus the growing numbers of SUVs on the road and increased use of smartphones, according to a new study by the Governors' Highway Safety Association. Yet hard-earned experience shows it' s very difficult to change people' s drinking habits, proclivity to push the gas pedal, taste for big cars, and tendency to be distracted by smartphones and other diversions.

So what, if anything, can be done?

New York City Transportation Department workers ready new speed-limit signs after the city debuted the country' s first Vision Zero initiative in 2014. Photo by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times.

Streets take — but also save — lives

There is one place we can make a big difference in reducing deaths and serious injuries — the roads themselves.

"It' s pretty clear that street design and adjacent land use largely determine motorists' behavior," explains Gary Toth, an engineer with the New Jersey Department of Transportation for 34 years and now executive vice president of Project for Public Spaces. "You can' t have police everywhere, but we can affect what motorists do by how we design the lane widths, the turning radius, and things like whether we frame the road with large parking lots or storefronts and other buildings facing the street."

"Humans are fallible, they are going to make mistakes. We need to design streets and set policies so that when people make mistakes, it results in a fender-bender or broken ankle, but not a death or life-altering injury," says Leah Shahum, director of the Vision Zero Network — a campaign helping communities enact programs to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries. At the heart of Vision Zero is a "safe systems" approach that shifts the primary concern about crashes from "who' s at fault" to "how can we create systems to prevent deaths and injuries."

More than 40 U.S. cities from Anchorage to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Fort Lauderdale have adopted Vision Zero strategies since 2014. These strategies take an upstream approach that doesn' t just target just the behavior of individual road users. They also promote policies, planning, and engineering approaches proven to reduce collisions.

The concept behind Vision Zero comes from Sweden, which in 1997 passed national traffic safety legislation with this audacious principle: "It can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system."

Sweden' s roads are now the safest in the world, with a fatality rate one-quarter of that of the U.S. Overall traffic fatalities in Sweden have dropped 50 percent since Vision Zero began, thanks to a series of measures that prioritize everyone' s safety over drivers' convenience. These include lower speed limits, road diets, roundabouts, more pedestrian zones, improved intersections, separated bicycle lanes, and strict enforcement of speed limits and drunk driving laws.

The Netherlands offers another example of how to create safer streets. While U.S. traffic deaths are currently down from their all-time high of 54,000 in 1972 (thanks in large part to regulations mandating safer cars), the Netherlands' focus on creating safer roadways has shifted its road fatality rate from being 20 percent higher than the U.S. in 1975 to 40 percent lower than the U.S. by 2010. Toth credits this turnaround to the Dutch policy of "self-explaining streets. This means that the design of the roadway itself offered motorists a clear sense of how to drive safely."

Tallying Traffic Fatalities

Memorial at a 2015 World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims event in San Francisco. Photo by Arunsankar Muralitharan, courtesy Walk SF (walksf.org).

Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people who were walking on streets across the U.S. That' s more than 13 people per day, or one person every hour and 46 minutes. It' s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing — with no survivors — every single month. Source: Dangerous by Design 2019.

Pedestrian Deaths Are on the Rise

Graphic by Haisam Hussein.

Relative Pedestrian Danger by Race and Ethnicity

Graphic by Haisam Hussein.

Learning from New York

New York City debuted America' s first Vision Zero initiative in 2014, following a year with 299 traffic deaths. By last year that number had dropped to 200, the lowest figure since 1910, when the city began keeping records. Pedestrian deaths, on the other hand, reached an all-time low in 2017 at 107 — down from 184 in 2013 — but rose slightly last year to 115.

So what is New York getting right, and what can other cities learn from it?

First, give pedestrians a head start, says Joe Cutrufo of the organization Transportation Alternatives. Programming in a few extra seconds for people crossing the street at stoplights (a practice known as Leading Pedestrian Intervals) means people in the crosswalk will be more visible to motorists making turns — one of the most common scenarios for pedestrian deaths. Increased ticketing of motorists who fail to yield to pedestrians also helped bring down pedestrian deaths across New York.

Safety cameras that automatically issue $50 tickets to motorists racing through school zones have made a difference, too, Cutrufo notes, adding, "Eighty percent of drivers who get a ticket never get a second one."

Other innovations include establishing 20 mph "neighborhood slow zones," which have reduced injuries by 31 percent, and lowering speed limits on city streets to 25 miles per hour. Seattle, Portland, Washington, D.C., Boston and — ironically — downtown Indianapolis (a city famous for high-speed cars) all have followed suit. Boston' s action reduced the number of cars traveling faster than 35 miles per hour on local streets by almost a third, according to research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Curbing the highest speeds on city streets is critical to reducing pedestrian deaths. Studies have documented how a pedestrian struck by a car traveling 20 mph dies in five percent of crashes, compared to 83 to 85 percent of pedestrians struck by cars traveling 40 mph.

"Five miles per hour makes a significant difference for safety, but makes little difference in people' s travel time in an urban environment with a lot of stops," says Ethan Fawley, Vision Zero Coordinator for Minneapolis.

Lessons from California

California has long served as an incubator of social trends — from freeways to yoga studios to online culture — that later sweep the nation. So it' s significant that the state is home to a quarter of America' s Vision Zero communities, which range from big cities like Los Angeles and San Jose to medium-sized towns like Watsonville and San Luis Obispo to suburbs like Fremont and La Mesa.

In 2014, San Francisco became the second U.S. city to adopt a Vision Zero action plan after one of the most deadly years on record for traffic fatalities with 34. By 2018, walking, bicycle, and motorist deaths had declined to 23. Like most Vision Zero cities, San Francisco' s campaign is steeped in data. The city has emphasized street improvements and law enforcement to deter excessive speeding because that was identified as the leading cause of death and injuries on city streets. These efforts target the 13 percent of streets that research shows account for three-quarters of crashes.

San Francisco revised its Vision Zero Action Strategy early this year, calling for automated safety cameras, lower speed limits, and congestion pricing (where motorists pay a fee to use certain streets as happens in London, Stockholm, Singapore and Milan, and will begin in New York City in 2021). The revised plan also strengthens the city' s commitment to broader goals: decreasing single occupancy car trips in the city by 80 percent, and making streets safer for older residents, people with disabilities, and people of color.

Social equity is a stated goal of many Vision Zero plans across the U.S., since people of color and low-income people are more likely to be victims of traffic crashes, especially as pedestrians. However African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are sometimes unfairly singled out for traffic stops by police, a form of discrimination widely known as "Driving While Black (or Brown)", which raises concern that increased enforcement of traffic laws under Vision Zero plans might amplify this problem. Leah Shahum, who served as director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition before founding the Vision Zero Network, stresses that all Vision Zero policies, especially law enforcement efforts, must be "implemented and tracked in ways that don' t have an unintended negative impact on certain communities." The use of safety cameras is one way to limit racial profiling, she adds.

Vision Zero is even taking root in Southern California — the first place in America to feverishly embrace private automobiles in the early 20th century. The beachfront Los Angeles County community of Santa Monica set an ambitious goal to reach zero deaths and serious injuries by 2026. They' re off to a flying start in redesigning streets with new lane configurations, protected bike lanes, and sidewalk bulb-outs as well as installing 50 stoplights with Leading Pedestrian Intervals, all of which helped them achieve zero fatalities in 2018, compared to nine the year before.

"We' re not saying, 'Great! We did it! Now, we' re done,' " cautions Jason Kligier, AICP, one of Santa Monica' s transportation planners, adding that the city is working to eliminate severe injuries as well. The Vision Zero campaign — dubbed "Take the Friendly Road" — also involves extensive surveys of residents to gather ideas for improving road safety and working with the police department to align enforcement operations.

Slowing down in Columbia, Missouri

City council member Ian Thomas remembers when people in Columbia, Missouri, realized something decisive needed to be done to make travel by foot safer. "On one day in January 2015, we had three separate crashes leaving one person dead and two injured," he recalls. "This was the fourth pedestrian death in four months."

Thomas sat down with Mayor Bob McDavid and leaders from the local bike and walking advocacy organization PedNet to hatch plans for a task force studying pedestrian problems. They enlisted representatives from a wide swath of the community — public schools, business owners, civic organizations, college students, the emergency room at the local hospital, the University of Missouri, the state department of transportation — and Vision Zero rose to the top of their list of 16 recommendations to the city council.

"We were impressed about how it seemed to be working in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle," he notes.

The city council unanimously approved the Vision Zero program in December 2016, and related ordinances banning texting while driving, creating a pedestrian education program for college and high school students, extensive safety audits at troublesome intersections, and exploring the use of traffic calming measures around the city. "Amazingly, there was no public opposition," he says. "But actually I was not completely surprised. One of the most frequent complaints I get from constituents is about speeding on their streets."

What has surprised Thomas is the impact Vision Zero had with city staff. "As these projects are coming forward, it' s affecting the culture of people working in this area. No longer is the biggest emphasis on getting people to jobs in the fastest possible manner. The focus now is preventing death and injury first and then looking at efficiency."

Thomas' s observation confirms hope among Vision Zero advocates that the grading system used by traffic engineers to determine road design known as "level of service" can eventually be switched to "level of safety." While in theory speed limits are supposed to ensure safety, the rule of thumb today is to set the speed limit on a street at the 85th percentile of average speeds, which means drivers' habits take precedence over safety considerations.

A 2017 safety study from the National Transportation Safety Board calls for replacing Levels of Service grades, which are based on research from the 1960s about rural roads.

"Speed kills," warns NTSB board chair Robert L. Sumwalt. "You can' t tackle our rising level of roadway deaths without tackling speeding."

"Speed is just as significant a factor in traffic deaths as alcohol," affirmed Jake Nelson, director of traffic safety advocacy and research for the American Automobile Association, in response to the study. Yet speeding hardly arouses the same social stigma as drunk driving.

Designing the Vision Zero Street

Rendering courtesy Vision Zero Network (visionzeronetwork.org).

Three core functions make up the Vision Zero design standard: discourage speeding by design; encourage walking, biking, and/or public transit use; and provide accessibility to all, regardless of age or physical ability. There are 10 essential elements:

1. ADA Accessibility

Design sidewalks to meet full ADA compliance and enable pedestrian access by people of all abilities.

2. Public Amenities

Install amenities like wayfinding, benches, bus stops and shelters, greenery, and bioswales to enhance the public realm.

3. Protected Bike Lanes

Install Class 1 Protected Bicycle Paths to reduce speeding and protect people on bicycles.

4. Narrow Vehicle Lanes

Reduce road lane width to 10 or 10.5 feet to reduce speeding — the driving behavior most likely to injure or kill.

5. Pedestrian Islands

Install pedestrian islands of at least five feet on all two-way multilane streets to provide safe harbors for people walking. Crosswalks leading to and from them should be high visibility.

6. Wide Sidewalks

Expand sidewalks to offer no less than eight feet of unobstructed width in order to encourage walking and reduce speeding.

7. Dedicated Mass Transit Facilities

Prioritize mass transit riders and efficient surface transit operations to encourage public transit use.

8. Signal-Protected Pedestrian Crossings

Give pedestrians exclusive crossing time to reduce turning conflicts. Consider hardened centerlines and slow-turn wedges to calm turning traffic.

9. Dedicated Unloading Zone

Make commercial curb regulation business friendly with dedicated unloading zones, which reduce double-parking and the disruption it causes.

10. Signal Retiming

Retime traffic signals for a 25 mph speed limit.

Source: Vision Zero Network

Putting it into perspective

Until now, U.S. safety efforts focused primarily on protecting drivers and passengers inside vehicles with seatbelts, airbags, and padded dashboards that cushion the blow in higher-speed collisions. While it' s true that pedestrian fatalities are down slightly from a peak around 1970, that is probably explained by the fact that fewer people today walk as a form of transportation, especially children.

Indeed in 1969, 89 percent of K–8 American students walked or biked to school if they lived within a mile. By 2009, that number dwindled to 35 percent. Fortunately, the number of kids walking to school appears to be inching up as many communities coast-to-coast adopt Safe-Routes to School programs. The goals of these campaigns are similar to Vision Zero initiatives, according to Cass Isidro, executive director of the Safe Routes to Schools National Partnership.

"It' s hard to have safe routes around schools without lowering speeds," she says.

Both programs draw on insights learned from other public health campaigns: "Make it easier for people to make the right choice," Isidro says. Displaying fresh fruit near the checkout line encourages better nutrition. Designing buildings so stairs are more visible than elevators facilitates physical activity. Building roads that make if feel natural to drive at a safe pace ensures safety.

What sets today' s Vision Zero efforts apart from earlier traffic safety initiatives — from Ralph Nader' s push for safer cars in the 1960s to drunk driving crackdowns since the 1980s — is a clear and ambitious goal and a systematic approach that gets at the root causes of crashes, says Ethan Fawley, a trained planner who cofounded the Minneapolis bike and walking advocacy organization Our Streets before becoming the city' s Vision Zero Program coordinator last year.

"The goal is zero, not just reductions, and that helps us recognize we need to do things that are fundamentally different than in the past," he says.

Jay Walljasper, author of The Great Neighborhood Book, writes, speaks, and consults about creating better communities.