In case you missed it in Friday's headlines, here's a video from Copenhagenize with some inspiration for this cold spell we've been having. The video shows Copenhageners -- lots of 'em -- making their way through the January snow. 

It's an instant retort to the old claim that "no one uses bike lanes in the winter." Of course, in Copenhagen they come prepared. Check out the bike-lane-specific plows used to keep the city clear for cyclists even in a snowstorm.

In fact, if your city has good bike infrastructure and maintains it well, cold-weather biking can become the norm too. According to Mikael Colville Andersen, 80 percent of Copenhageners who bike keep cycling all through the winter. And many of the top cycling cities in the developed world are in Denmark and Sweden, neither of which is famous for balmy climes.

The following article, "Ending the Body Count," appears in the upcoming fall edition of Transportation Alternatives' Reclaim Magazine.

Last year, I wrote a letter to the NYC Department of Transportation asking for traffic calming on 65th Street near my home in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Several elderly pedestrians had been struck and killed by cars nearby. This is a street where I grew up and where my parents still live. A traffic employee was sent to monitor the speeds of passing vehicles, and I received a letter shortly afterward stating that careful analysis had led to the conclusion that no calming measure was justified. This seemed perverse. How many dead or tragically injured bodies does it take to put in a speed bump, neck down or stop sign on a street? Isn’t one enough?

New York could use some lessons on Swedish transportation ethics. Eleven years ago, the Swedish Parliament passed a bold transportation bill based on a road safety philosophy called Vision Zero. The road transport system in Sweden is already one of the safest in the world, but even the low number of fatalities is viewed as unacceptable. Based on a zero tolerance attitude, Sweden has strategized to eliminate all fatalities and serious injuries on its road transport system by 2020.  

Vision Zero is founded on the ethical premise that society can never exchange life or health for other benefits. Under the current transportation paradigm in New York, human life and health is traded for mobility, economics and other factors. An optimally designed road system should not lead to death or life-long physical impairment. Streets are engineered so as to make traffic fatalities impossible, most often through designing lower speeds into the roadbed. Better sight lines, traffic calming and public education all play their part in eliminating fatalities, and ensuring that the remaining crashes don’t result in serious injury.

The origins of Vision Zero and the zero tolerance mantra can be traced back 100 years to industrial safety standards and the chemical industry. Workers were protected under zero tolerance from noxious chemicals, heavy injury or risk of death. It wasn’t easy, but laws eventually forbade industry from placing profit and expediency above the lives and safety of workers.

The road transport system needs safer engineering and needs to be more forgiving of human error. The Stockholm Environment Institute, an independent research center focused on sustainable development, argues that the road environment should not deliver a death penalty if someone makes a mistake. Streets must allow for human error without it leading to serious injury.

When a car in New York jumps a curb or makes a right turn that results in the injury of a pedestrian, it is usually reported as an accident, alluding to the unexpectedness of the event. Streets where cars can drive at speeds of 30+ mph are bound to have a crash at some point according to the laws of probability. Low speed limits, separated bike lanes and well-designed shared spaces are sample infrastructure changes that can help reach a Vision Zero performance target. When it comes to road safety, crashes should be viewed as mistakes in street design rather than unavoidable accidents.

More than 250 New Yorkers are killed in automobile-related crashes every year, and it’s not unusual for City officials to tout these historically low numbers as evidence that they are doing their jobs well, as if exchanging 250 lives is a reasonable trade for mobility. Only in transportation is this somehow acceptable. This past spring, two construction cranes toppled over in separate incidents, killing six people and injuring several others. This prompted the Department of Buildings to declare war on falling cranes. Clearly, objects crashing down on city streets are a serious hazard to people, legitimizing such a hard stance. Automobiles moving at high speeds are the horizontal counterparts of falling cranes and building debris.

Sweden has seen a steady decline in crash fatalities in the ten years since making Vision Zero the cornerstone of its road safety plan. The success is influencing several other countries such as Austria, Switzerland, Britain, The Netherlands and Germany to consider the policy.  A dense urban locality has yet to implement Vision Zero without a federal directive, and New York would be an ideal testing ground. All that is required is a shift from the current policy of crash reduction to the elimination of death and serious injury. A civilized society should not treat crash victims as collateral damage.

Photo: wallyg/Flickr

“This is the golden age of safety, the safest period, in the safest mode, in the history of the world.”

That's Marion C. Blakey, former administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, speaking last month just before the end of her five year term. As today's New York Times reports, Blakey presided over the FAA during the last half of a 10 year period in which fatal airplane crashes in the United States dropped by 65 percent, to one fatal incident per roughly 4.5 million departures. 

There have been no fatal airliner crashes involving scheduled flights this year in the United States and just one fatal accident: a mechanic who was trying to close the cabin door of a chartered Boeing 737 on the ground in Tunica, Miss., fell to the pavement during a rainstorm.

Airline safety improvements over the past decade can be credited in large part to a government directive issued after two 1996 crashes -- TWA 800 off Long Island and ValuJet 592 in the Florida Everglades -- killed a combined 375 people. Yet there is no such action demanded to address the ~42,000 auto-related deaths that occur on domestic streets, roads and highways every year.

Mark Rosenberg, founder and former director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wants to change that. A proponent of the Swedish-born "VIsion Zero" (as in zero roadway deaths) movement, he has evidence to prove it can be done, writes Washington Post columnist Neal Peirce.

Traffic deaths, Rosenberg insists, constitute an epidemic we can prevent. Sweden has succeeded, driving its yearly toll down to 440, lowest since World War II. Annual traffic-related deaths of children, once 118, sank to 11 at last count.

How did the Swedes do it? Tough seat belt and helmet laws, to be sure. But they've also begun to remake their roadways. Red lights at intersections (which encourage drivers to accelerate dangerously to "beat the light") are being replaced with traffic circles. Four-foot high barriers of lightweight but tough Mylar are being installed down the center of roadways to prevent head-on collisions. On local streets, narrowed roadways and speed bumps, plus raised pedestrian crosswalks, limit speeds to a generally non-lethal 20 miles an hour.

Britain, New Zealand and the Netherlands are also registering major success with safety redesign and tough roadway rules. New Zealand cut its death rate by 50 percent in 10 years. But in the United States, we're "stuck," notes Rosenberg, at 42,000 to 43,000 deaths a year, adding:

"If those 42,000 deaths came from air accidents, air traffic would come to a screaming halt, all airports closed until we fixed the problem. But because our staggering numbers of road deaths come in ones and twos, they don't get attention. Fatalism is our biggest enemy."

Photo: ATIS547/Flickr

Sweden re-launched its congestion pricing system today following a 6-month trial and voter referendum last September, in which Stockholm residents approved the traffic control measure by a margin of 52 to 45. The referendum was a definitive victory for a system that reduced Stockholm's traffic congestion by as much as 50 percent and decreased noxious air pollution by 14 percent (you can see some stats here). Notably, prior to the 6-month trial run, polls showed that as many as 80 percent of Stockholm residents were against the idea congestion pricing.

The Local reports on the newly relaunched pricing system:

There will be a number of key differences between the new arrangements and those during last year's trial. One change is that the transponders - electronic devices used in the trial to make it possible to take the charge directly out of drivers' accounts - will not be used. Instead, cameras will read cars' plates, and those vehicles whose drivers are registered will have the money debited directly from their accounts.

Other drivers, as before, will have to pay the charge within 14 days of driving in the zone. This can be done online, at Pressbyrån or 7-Eleven stores or in banks.

Another key difference is that taxis will no longer be exempted from paying the charge. A number of taxi operators have already said they plan to increase charges as a result. The charge will be tax-deductable for some companies and commuters.

Mike Castleman, a New Yorker currently in Stockholm offers some congestion pricing photographs on Flickr. Below is a photo of the pricing menu, which charges different fees based on time-of-day. "Kr" stands for Kronor, the Swedish currency.

Stockholm has just completed its congestion pricing trial. Thanks to broad public support, parliament voted to make the fee permanent. Will New York be in the same position years from now? The Local (Sweden) reports:

Sweden's parliament on Wednesday voted in favour of a permanent road toll for Stockholm in a bid to reduce congestion, with the scheme kicking off on August 1.

The system is aimed at reducing traffic and pollution in the city, and the revenue is to be used for road improvement in the Stockholm area. The toll was broadly supported by deputies, who cast their votes several times on individual aspects of the bill rather than on one overall proposal. The toll was operated on a trial basis last year and exceeded expectations of a 10 to 15 percent reduction of cars entering and leaving the capital, registering instead an average fall of between 20 and 25 percent.

Stockholm residents voted to adopt the congestion charge in a referendum held in September 2006 in conjunction with the country's legislative elections. The Swedish capital will join other cities such as London, Rome and Singapore which have already introduced toll schemes.

All vehicles except buses and foreign-registered cars that enter or exit central Stockholm on weekdays during the peak hours of 6:30 am to 6:29 pm will be required to pay a fee. Electric cars and hybrid vehicles will be exempt from the toll until 2012.

Traffic Information & Relief Bill Press Conference 
Running time: 4 minutes 3 seconds

Transportation Alternatives held press conference on the steps of City Hall yesterday in support of Intro 199, a bill introduced in the City Council by Councilmember Gale Brewer that calls for better information-gathering about the city's traffic and aims to "reduce the proportion of driving to the central business districts and increase the proportion of walking, biking and the use of mass transit."

Mary Beth Kelly, widow of Dr. Carl Henry Nacht, who was killed by a truck when he was riding his bike on the West Side bike path, spoke strongly about the need for traffic policy that will address the intimidation of pedestrians and bicyclists by vehicles on the city's streets. She called for a goal of zero fatalities of cyclists struck by vehicles, the same goal that has been embraced by the city of Stockholm, Sweden. "Why should Stockholm lead?" asked Kelly. "We're New York, we can lead."

Meanwhile, after the council hearing on the legislation was over, Department of Transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall, who spoke against it as unnecessary, noted that DOT figures show a decrease in the number of vehicles entering Manhattan, from 978,487 in 2000 to 943,381 in 2005, and suggested that increased traffic chaos existed merely in the public imagination. "You have SUVs, you got these minivans. I think the cars are getting bigger and there is a perception there is more traffic," Weinshall was quoted as saying in Newsday. "We think it is still manageable."

But how can you manage what you don't know? Good management requires good data. As Bruce Schaller points out in his new study, Traffic Information in NYC (PDF) there is still a lot we don't know about how New York City's streets are being used, particularly when it comes to pedestrians, buses, bikes and other non-motorized activities.