The city still needs a Collision Investigation Squad
Back in 2018, I posted about the need for a Collision Investigation Squad like the one described above that would analyze every injury accident on city streets to determine why they happened and what can be done to prevent them from happening again.
Why hasn't San Francisco already done this?
My answer:
One major obstacle is the advantage that not doing that gives City Hall. Without doing that analysis, the city can now simply lump all accidents under the "collisions" term required by the Vision Zero campaign.They can then pretend that every injury accident and traffic fatality on city streets requires another job-creating "improvement" project on city streets of questionable safety value. Then they can brag about all the safety "improvements" they're making by listing those projects.
Every month the city does that with a video like this:
We now know that those "improvements" have made no difference in preventing fatalities on city streets.
We learned years ago that we can't rely on the city to even count cycling and pedestrian accidents.
An important part of the mandate of a city Collision Investigation Squad would be to not only do a thorough analysis of every injury accident on city streets but to also make that analysis public.
As it is now, City Hall can pretend that all accidents/"collisions" can be prevented by making "improvements" to city streets.
By beginning to practice genuine transparency about why and where accidents happen on our streets, City Hall would have to drop that pretense, not to mention the Vision Zero fantasy that all accidents are actually preventable.
Labels: Anti-Car, City Government, Collision Investigation Squad, Collisions Report, Cycling and Safety, Examiner, Media, Pedestrian Safety, SF Chronicle, UC Study, Vision Zero
posted by Rob Anderson @ 1:30 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Massachusetts law requires investigation of every motor vehicle involved fatality. Start there Rob, and try to make it every vehicular roadway fatality, no matter the type of vehicle.
Yes, and, just as important, the Collision Investigation Squad should then make the results of every investigation public, so we can better understand how safe/unsafe our streets really are. Not clear that the city now investigates every fatal traffic accident. If they do, they don't make the results public. Why is that?
One can only speculate, but I suspect that the facts would radically undermine the Vision Zero bullshit that insists all injury and fatal accidents are avoidable, that if the city keeps making all those "improvements" to our streets death and injury will someday disappear from city streets. Actually, we can be more specific about fatalities; Vision Zero doctrine tells us that they will come to an end in 2024!
Yes, even though the Mass. state police do fatal investigations, it often takes over a year and takes a public records request to get a report, maybe. One of the worst records in the country for openness and responding to public records records requests.
One report I was sure to get/read was of a cyclist in all dark clothing, no lights, who got run over by a gasoline tanker truck on a rainy, dark winter night. The trucker was turning from one designated truck route street to another and crossed over into the opposing lane occupied by the cyclist. The intersection had a couple years earlier been narrowed in a failed Vision Zero effort to shorten the pedestrian crossing distance. It was a joint project by MIT and the People's Republic of Cambridge, so no public officials wanted to talk about the cyclist they killed. Immensely stupid to narrow intersections especially when they are truck routes and/or numbered state highways for all legal vehicles to use.
Yes. Investigations without public transparency doesn't help us understand what's really happening on our streets. Instead, they will be used to further some other agenda.
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