Vision Zero failing in SF, New York, Los Angeles, Portland...

Walk San Francisco

Vision Zero is failing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Portland and probably everywhere else.

Gee, I wonder why? Could it be that Vision Zero was always only a slogan based on wishful thinking?

The city's anti-car special interest groups are calling for a state of emergency, as if a rhetorical escalation and doubling down on anti-carism will do the trick where the slogan and wishful thinking have failed.

Everyone wants safe streets, but City Hall supported bullshit is not only annoying it undermines the credibility of government itself.

How are we doing?

Look at the fatality numbers over history in San Francisco and you can see how much better the city is doing now than in the recent past: see pages 5-7 in this document.

Nationwide fatalities per vehicle mile traveled are also going down.

Wikipedia

Busy freeways or empty trains?

The Antiplanner

Randal O'Toole:

The Idiotic Induced Demand Argument

Streetsblog makes the absurd argument that Colorado should run trains that will be nearly empty because the alternative of building roads doesn’t work: new roads get “filled back up with cars in less than five years.” 

This is the old “induced demand” claim, but there is no such thing as induced demand. If there were, then roads in rural Colorado would be as congested as interstates 25 and 70 near downtown Denver. Having just returned from a trip through Colorado, I can assure you that they aren’t.

What’s really happening is that congestion suppresses economic activity. Relieving congestion allows that economic activity to increase, which increases urban productivity and wealth. Having roads fill up in five years is a sign of success, not failure.

Regardless of the cause of increased traffic, how sensible is an argument that says the government should build things that people don’t want rather than things they do want? 

According to this argument, Edison should have made a better whale-oil lamp rather than an electric light bulb; Ford should have made horse-drawn carriages rather than the Model T; and Apple should have made Blackberries instead of iPhones. 

Only government planners would think that empty trains are a better idea than full freeways.