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

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.

Then there's the safety-in-numbers rule -- also called "P.J.'s Law," after Peter Jacobsen, the California engineer who documented it in 2003 -- which posits that doubling the number of cyclists on the road tends to bring about a corresponding one-third reduction in vehicle-cyclist crashes. In other words, the more cyclists who take to the streets, the safer the streets get for them.

"Over the past decade, regular cycling has increased 30 percent and annual bicyclist injuries and fatalities have dropped 40 percent," says Budnick. "That said, even one death is too many. This is why initiatives like Vision Zero, in Sweden, are so important. They set a hard target and push government to achieve it."

So while city streets may indeed be getting safer, as Mayor Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan declared, in addition to reconciling its crash data and incorporating figures on pedestrian and cyclist injuries, there's still plenty of room for improvements, physical and otherwise -- a fact also tacitly acknowledged by Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan. But will the city ever aim as high, or low in this case, as the Swedes?

"More protected bike lanes, better traffic enforcement, tougher laws against drivers who hit bikers and walkers and more cyclists will prevent crashes and bring NYC’s numbers down," Budnick says. "We need a 'Vision Zero' vision from the city."

Chart data courtesy Transportation Alternatives

“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