Vision Zero hits the wall

As I've pointed out, when the city talks about Vision Zero or the Chronicle and the Examiner write about it, it just makes everyone sound stupid.

The assumption that Vision Zero is a realistic traffic safety policy was dumb in the first place. Instead of just saying "We want to end traffic fatalities in San Francisco in the foreseeable future," the city promised to do it by 2024 to assure the public that it was serious about traffic safety.

Instead, it substituted wishful thinking for serious safety policy. 

If wishes were bikes, the homeless could ride.

When the Board of Supervisors recently rejected the mayor's nomination of Jane Natoli to the MTA board, I figured that's the last we would hear of Natoli, who I blogged about early this year. 

Wrong!

In a recent Chronicle story about Vision Zero, we revisit Naoli's cycling misadventures:

When the driver of the Mini Cooper pulled over without signaling into the bike lane on North Point Street, right in the path of Jane Natoli’s bicycle, her only thought was I’m going to die here. Natoli smashed into the passenger’s side mirror and door and fell to the ground, breaking a bone in her left index finger 

The Jan. 12 crash was the third time the Inner Richmond resident, who cycles as her primary form of transportation, collided with a car in San Francisco. But she considers herself lucky: Friends have broken their shoulders and injured their necks, and she's well aware that cyclists are killed by cars on the city’s streets.

I suggested that these "collisions"---which are in fact "accidents," since presumably the motorists didn't hit Natoli deliberately---are reality sending her a message: riding a bike is dangerous, and the city can't really make it safe.

Five years ago, the SFPD's Mikhail Ali explained Natoli's accidents---and every other "crash" on city streets:

“A lot of it is just really, really bad behavior,” he said. He’s been accused of blaming the victim in the cases of those pedestrians and bicyclists who caused their own deaths, but said showing the truth behind these collisions rather than lumping them together as statistics is important.

“If we play this kind of sterile, numbers-only game, people surmise that it’s fairly innocuous behavior that’s causing these fatalities when in fact it’s very clear what the behaviors are,” he said. “The hope is that the public will change their behavior voluntarily.”

How likely is it that people will change "their behavior," that they will stop driving recklessly/negligently? People don't indulge in bad behavior in traffic all the time, but most of us do it occasionally, because, well, it's characteristic of human behavior to make mistakes---or sometimes even to be drunk or on drugs while driving.

No "improvement" in street design will change human nature. It's also part of human nature to pretend that we can make riding a bike---or even walking on city streets---completely safe. That's the fallacy underlying Vision Zero.

More:

During Tuesday’s meeting, a dozen residents and transit advocates challenged the board to reign in increasingly aggressive driving and fund proven ways to make streets safer, including more daylighting, which removes visual barriers within a minimum of 10 feet of a crosswalk, and protecting intersections, such as by adding a concrete island at the corner, which slows turning cars.

They are asking the city to do the impossible. Maybe the measures above will over time prevent some accidents, but they won't prevent the kind of accidents that happened to Natoli, which were caused by "really bad behavior" by human beings driving motor vehicles.

More:

Olivia Gamboa, a doctor at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco and board member of the nonprofit Walk SF, said she’s treated multiple senior citizens, and once a cancer patient who was too weak to cross the road in time, who’ve been seriously injured when hit by cars. “I know that you know how to make our streets safer,” she told the board. “This is not a technical puzzle. This is a moral imperative.”

No, they don't really "know how to make our streets safer." The Vision Zero slogan fosters the illusion that the city can/will do that. None of the people Doctor Gamboa treated for those injuries was deliberately hit by a motorist.

By the way, describing Walk SF as a "nonprofit" is inadequate, since it is an anti-car special interest group, like the Bicycle Coalition. Both groups think that making it harder to drive---or even to park---in the city will somehow make our streets safer.

More:

Alvin Lester, founding member of San Francisco Bay Area Families for Safe Streets, said Vision Zero hasn’t yet brought promised changes on many of the city’s deadliest streets, including where his son, Arman Hakeem Lester, was killed in 2014. “I believe Vision Zero is still the right solution, but it can only succeed if the city quickly and systematically redesign streets to protect people and put a stop to rampant dangerous driving,” Lester said in a statement.

No, Lester is in effect a victim of the Vision Zero slogan that promises the city can end fatalities on city streets. Street design "improvements" may make our streets a little safer, but they will never make our streets completely safe when people engage in "bad behavior" on those streets, which will continue forever.

More:

The SFMTA’s director of transportation, Jeffrey Tumlin, said there was “no excuse” for pedestrian injuries and fatalities, but pointed out the agency faces hard fiscal choices in the near future. 

“In order to allocate more resources to safety, we’ll have to cut Muni, we’ll also have to tap our reserves, the same source of funding to pay for basic operations once (federal) funding runs out in December,” he said. “I’d be delighted to do that if I was confident we would still be able to pay the salaries of our staff 18 months from now.”

Tumlin has a problem, since he is managing an agency that as of 2019 had 7,079 employees. That year those employees were paid $583,686,138. That raises a question: Is that a transit agency or a jobs program?

Besides, even if money was available, where/how would it be invested in street safety? The city has been methodically making all kinds of "improvements" to our streets for years that haven't reduced fatalities. A charitable interpretation: if they hadn't been doing that, there would have been even more deaths on city streets.

And even more:

The agency doesn’t have the authority to do so on all roadways without a rigorous process dictated by the state. Automated speed enforcement with surveillance cameras is also illegal in California. The agency is working with elected officials to change these laws.

I discussed the red light camera issue the other day, pointing out that San Francisco already has a Red Light Camera and Automatic Enforcement Program. Like the Examiner, the Chronicle keeps implying that there's a legal problem that the state has to do something about.

Apparently that's not true. It would be helpful to see some reporting to clarify that issue.