The Vision Zero delusion

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(as of 8/31/2020)

What is Vision Zero? is the title of a story in the latest NOPNA News, a newsletter about my neighborhood in San Francisco.

Regular readers know my answer to that question: it's a slogan that the SFMTA pretends is a traffic safety policy.

Apparently that pretense is wearing thin even in the MTA, since you can no longer find any mention of 2024 on the city's Vision Zero sites, even though since 2014, when the slogan/policy was adopted, that was the year when all traffic deaths in San Francisco were going to end.

From the story:

Many of us have enjoyed the reduction in automobile traffic in our neighborhood lately. As the city reopens, however, that sense of calm on the neighborhood streets might fade.

I neither enjoyed nor noticed a significant reduction in car traffic in the neighborhood. Seemed pretty much the same as always to me.

More:

Did you know that, every year, about 30 people are killed while traveling on San Francisco’s streets? 200 more are seriously injured. These deaths and injuries are preventable.

Yes, I know about death and injury on city streets, since I've posted about it on this blog for years, particularly on the city's annual Collisions Reports. (That's the last one the city issued way back in 2016.) And no, all that death and injury are not preventable, though of course it can be reduced.

The reality: most traffic accidents in San Francisco---and, I suspect, everywhere else---are caused by bad behavior by motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians. All the "improvements" City Hall is always implementing on city streets have had no effect on traffic safety in the city.

More:

The good news is that a collaborative effort continues to make progress toward its goal of zero traffic deaths on San Francisco streets by 2024. Ambitious? Yes. But, as the Vision Zero SF Action Strategy states, “traffic fatalities are preventable” and “traffic safety interventions mitigate the likelihood that a collision will result in death.”

Check the Vision Zero graph above and you see that in fact the city is on track to have an average fatality year in 2020.

More:

Adding Automated Speed Enforcement cameras: after implementing these, traffic fatalities reduced by 73% and traffic related injuries reduced by 34% in Washington, DC.

Like that recent story in the SF Examiner, the implication is that the city has not "implemented" this system, though of course it has had it since 1996.

More:

Pricing and Reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled: London experienced a 40% drop in collisions after instituting a congestion charge.

London's population is almost 9 million, while San Francisco's is less than one million. This city's traffic congestion is trivial compared to London's.

This is called "congestion pricing." The city would really like to implement that system and charge everyone who drives downtown in San Francisco. It would be a two-fer: punish those who drive those wicked motor vehicles and raise a lot of money to sustain our bloated city government.

The problem: congestion pricing polls poorly. Turns out that city residents don't want to pay to visit their own downtown, not to mention that congestion priding would decimate what's left of the city's retail businesses downtown.

See also San Francisco Severe Traffic Injury Trends: 2011-2018