Streetsblog New York City

Vision Zero is about more than looking both ways.

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.

On Tuesday the Bloomberg administration announced record low traffic deaths from 2000 to 2007, and claimed, if not in so many words, that city streets are safer than ever. But the numbers, included on a chart that accompanied this media release, also indicated that 23 cyclists died in 2007. That would make last year -- according to the data released Tuesday, at least -- the deadliest for riders in the eight year period shown.

But are those figures accurate? And in the context of the growing number of people cycling throughout the city, what do they mean?

According to a 2006 joint report from DOT, NYPD and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (40-page pdf), 24 cyclists were killed in 2005, and 23 were killed in 2002. That doesn't match the figures released this week. And while it could be easy to assume that that only means the streets are even more dangerous than portrayed, such variations in the raw numbers don't necessarily mean much in terms of safety.

"The sample size is so small and standard deviation so little that T.A. has never found deaths to be an adequate indicator of safety trends," says Noah Budnick of Transportation Alternatives. "That's why we requested the city's 2006 report look at injuries too."

Comparing fatal crashes with daily ridership, Budnick says that the crash rate -- the number of deaths per cyclist -- shows a decline since 1985, which is as far back as T.A. has complete data sets for both ridership and fatalities.

Airline safety has improved dramatically in the last 10 years, after two 1996 crashes killed 375 people.

“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