Anti-carism and emergency response

By Kathleen St. Germaine:

Traffic calming. Road diets. Complete streets. Vision zero. All these terms refer to policies whose goal is to reduce automobile speeds by narrowing or removing vehicle lanes and increasing congestion.

Cities say they are adopting these programs to increase safety for all users of the street, yet they have no evidence that the policies will actually reduce pedestrian, cyclist, and other traffic-related deaths.

When confronted with facts showing that many of the design changes in their plans may result or have resulted in increased accidents, they either turn a blind eye or address their concerns for potential liability by imposing more heavy-handed solutions for delay-inducing schemes. 

The answer to unraveling the confusion in the new designs of “traffic calming” is to create separate signalization for vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, delaying drivers even more, but for which, only drivers will be held accountable with fines.

“Streets are for people, not cars,” advocates say, conveniently ignoring the fact that the driver and any passengers in every moving vehicle are people.

Apologists for imposing magnitudes of delay to people in vehicles by increasing congestion point to research showing that pedestrians are more likely to die if struck by a car traveling 40 miles per hour than one traveling 20 miles per hour. That is certainly true, but that fact doesn’t prove that their policies actually prevent vehicle related accidents.

On the other hand, studies show that the traffic-slowing projects will kill more people than the lives that might be saved.

For many in transportation planning, the true goal of slowing vehicle travel is to reduce the viability of the automobile as a mode of urban travel. Throughout the years many planners have openly expressed their concerns that a modal shift to non-motorized means of travel will not occur unless the efficacy of travel by car is reduced to that of non-motorized speeds of travel.

One problem is that traffic calming is mainly applied to local neighborhood streets while road diets are mainly applied to collector streets. Yet most pedestrian fatalities take place on arterial streets, which means they are ignoring the real problems.

Slowing traffic to reduce accident fatalities doesn’t work. Portland, Oregon has been applying traffic calming and road diets to its streets since the 1990s. As of 2001, the city had experienced a five-year average of 11 pedestrian fatalities per year. By 2019, this had increased to 15. Even more fatalities took place in 2020, and 2021 is currently on track to being just as bad. 

Recognizing its failure, Portland dissolved its Vision Zero taskforce early this year.

In 2014, San Francisco adopted a vision-zero policy whose goal was to eliminate pedestrian and bicycle fatalities by 2024 via a city-wide slowdown in traffic speeds. Yet fatalities in 2019 were only slightly less than they had been in 2014, leading the city to conclude that the policy was failing to meet its target. (emphasis added)

Other U.S. cities that adopted vision-zero policies of slowing traffic with the goal of eliminating pedestrian fatalities have seen fatalities rise instead. Several years after adopting vision zero, traffic deaths were rising in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Jose.

Other cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, didn’t see a rise in deaths, but they didn’t see a fall either. While it seems unlikely that slowing traffic is making pedestrians and cyclists less safe, it certainly isn’t making them safer.

Traffic-slowing programs are mainly applied to local and collector streets. Yet, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (using 2015-2019 data), nearly two-thirds of urban pedestrian and bicycle fatalities take place on non-freeway arterial streets, while less than a quarter take place on collector and local streets.

In addition, the great majority of pedestrian fatalities–--77 percent on non-freeway arterials, 70 percent on collectors, and 57 percent on local streets–--take place after dark. Less than 10 percent of these report speeding as an issue, so the real problem may be visibility, not speed.

In half of nighttime pedestrian fatalities, the pedestrians were under the influence of alcohol, and 70 percent were the result of pedestrians crossing a street outside of a crosswalk or away from an intersection. All these factors suggest that the focus on speed ignores the real problems....

For San Francisco see Vision Zero update.