Vision Zero is meaningless unless we get more drivers off the road

This post is the first in a series about achieving meaningful car trip reduction in DC.

Last year, Conor Shaw and I reviewed DC’s progress toward its Vision Zero goal to eliminate all traffic fatalities by 2024. The result was a categorical failing grade. Not only has traffic violence not fallen by any amount, deaths have increased, culminating in last year’s highest total in over a decade, with 40 people killed on our streets. Each and every one of these deaths is a collective tragedy. Their suddenness and brutality, often stealing people in the prime of their lives, rips the hearts out of families and communities.

And these fatalities are just the headline-grabbers; thousands more non-fatal crashes each year still result in devastating violence, years of recovery, and lifelong trauma. While their ubiquity has sadly normalized their occurrence in our collective minds, we should fight this impulse. Traffic violence is a public-health crisis, and should be treated as such.

Our analysis traced the failure of DC’s Vision Zero initiative back to its origins. When launched, Mayor Bowser’s plan was already obsolete. Heavy on the inconsistent and relatively ineffective tactics of education and manual enforcement, the plan sidestepped and slow-played any meaningful embrace of the much more necessary re-engineering of dangerous streets.

The past seven years of failure, including more and more high-profile deaths of children at the hands of drivers, has rightfully prompted outrage. Residents have clued into the limitations of our current plan, and are increasingly demanding at least light engineering changes like speed bumps, stop signs, and raised crosswalks. A flurry of new bills before the DC Council right now represent that renewed energy:

• Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau’s Walk Without Worry Act would make raised crosswalks a standard treatment at thousands of DC intersections.
• Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George’s Safe Routes to School Act would standardize and supercharge traffic safety measures around schools.
• Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh’s Safer Intersections Amendment Act and Upgrading Tactical Safety Projects Amendment Act would, respectively, ban right turns on red and require DDOT to turn plastic flex-post barriers into hardened, permanent safety features.

These are all excellent bills that flip the script from hoping drivers change their individual behavior to designing streets that leave drivers with fewer opportunities to cause harm in the first place. Passed, funded, and properly implemented, they all should help us move closer to the topline goal of eliminating traffic deaths.

But even these meaningful steps are unlikely to get us close to zero traffic deaths anytime soon. Speed bumps and stop signs alone are not going to bring the kind of change residents are demanding, and we will waste another decade if we pretend they will.

If we mean what we say about Vision Zero, we have to tackle the core problem: There are too many cars in too many places in the District. We need to clearly state that our goal is to get people to drive less.

Reducing car trips saves lives

The reality is simple: Driving is dangerous. More car trips equal more crashes. More crashes equal more injuries and deaths. Policies that mitigate the damage a crash can do are great, but the safest trip for all road users is one that doesn’t involve a car at all.

Todd Littman, founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, summarizes it well here, calling vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) reduction a “new traffic safety paradigm”:

“An abundance of research…indicates that, all else being equal, increases in motor vehicle travel increase crashes, and vehicle travel reductions increase safety. In other words, the new traffic safety paradigm recognizes exposure, the amount that people drive, as a risk factor…This means that we can increase safety by either reducing per-mile casualty rates through road and vehicle design improvement, and policies that reduce high-risk driving, and by reducing total vehicle travel which reduces total risk exposure. The old safety paradigm only considers the first approach. The new paradigm recognizes both approaches.”

This is a reality DC already recognizes. Our Sustainable DC 2.0 plan endorsed this exact strategy in advocating for replacing car trips with public transportation:

“Traveling by public transportation is 10 times safer per mile than traveling by automobile. We each reduce the chance of being in a crash by more than 90 percent simply by taking public transit as opposed to commuting by car.”

Safe systems

The idea of eliminating car trips in the first place is right in line with the safe systems thinking that powers Vision Zero.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety Hazards (NIOSH), a part of the Center for Disease Control, has created a popular “hierarchy of controls” rubric for thinking about how to design safe systems. The hierarchy ranks different safety treatments by their effectiveness, and suggests that the most time and effort should be put into removing, replacing, and isolating hazards in the first place.

Seattle-area safe streets advocacy group @QAGreenways applied the NIOSH hierarchy to street design principles. Their chart is excellent in its simplicity and clarity:

The three “Es” of engineering, education and enforcement traditionally emphasized by transportation planners are all here, and this chart reflects the important corrective that engineering should be placed at a higher level than the other two. But the chart also makes clear that a fourth “E” of elimination holds the most promise.

The Oslo example

For a great example of this principle in action, we can look at one of Vision Zero’s global success stories: Oslo, Norway, which reached the laudable achievement of only a single traffic death in 2019, a driver who hit a fence.

You can see from the above chart that the path wasn’t entirely linear. In 1975, Oslo had a population of 644,000 and 41 traffic deaths, remarkably similar to present-day DC. Researchers credit lower speed limits and speed bumps in the ’70s, greater investment in public transportation in the ’80s, and the rerouting of some car traffic into underground tunnels in the ’90s (along with safer vehicles, and lower rates of drunk driving overall) with the initial 25 years of improvement. But by the early 2000s, when the city adopted Vision Zero as a goal, that number started plateauing at around 10 deaths per year. It wasn’t until the last five years that it dropped again and hit that remarkable single death in 2019.

That time period corresponded with Oslo’s leaders implementing a comprehensive Car-Free Livability Program. Informed by a survey of residents that identified dissatisfaction with heavy traffic, lack of green space, and little after-work-hours activity downtown, decisionmakers sought to revitalize their city center by dramatically reducing the number of cars. The plan included removing thousands of parking spaces, significantly increasing tolls, and establishing car-free public plazas and “heart zones” around schools.

It worked: between 2016 and 2019 the number of cars in the city center decreased by 28%. In a 10-year window, those changes plus additional investments in service have led to a 63% increase in the number of public transit trips – overtaking cars as the most popular mode. And contrary to business fears of economic hardship, local authorities have reported 10% growth in visits to downtown shops and increasing value of real estate as desirability has increased.

Drivers as guests

Changes like limiting vehicle access, removing parking and charging drivers for trips that they currently take for free feel extreme compared to our American status quo. But none of that was universally popular in Oslo, either. The original plan was to ban cars entirely from the city center, but political backlash scaled it back to an incentives-forward approach. The key was sticking to the core principle that the city should redefine who and what public space is for. As Oslo mayor Raymond Johansen summarized: “Car traffic will always be a part of the city, but the drivers should act as guests.”

Considering “who’s the guest” in the District makes clear why we keep failing. We’ll champion additional enforcement, until it catches too many violators. We’ll install protected bike lanes, but only when it doesn’t replace too much parking. We’ll redesign the most dangerous intersection in the city, but leave a park sandwiched between sixteen lanes of highway.

Such are the policies of a city where drivers are very much the primary constituency for a road, while anyone walking, biking, taking transit, or using a mobility device—who are susceptible to injury or death if a driver hits them— are the “guests.”

You can handle the truth

At the very least, we should be honest that this is the prioritization we have chosen. But rather than make that clear or explain what it will really take to realize Vision Zero, District leaders have largely just told people what they want to hear – that there are no tradeoffs involved, and we can achieve safe streets without most individual residents having to change their lifestyles at all.

It’s political cowardice that has bred a litany of false beliefs: that traffic congestion is an equivalent problem to traffic safety; that everyone should be able to park directly in front of their destination at all times; that a few speed bumps, or an extra patrol car, or some new signage will be enough to keep our children safe. These views are both resoundingly ubiquitous and radically untrue, and residents deserve to know that!

The cynical take is that learning the truth won’t actually engender support. They might not admit it in public, but forced to choose, many District residents are likely quite fine with the status quo. “A few dozen deaths and a few thousand injuries a year are lamentable, of course, but if that’s the cost of doing business…”

There might be some truth in this, but it shouldn’t be all-controlling. Hundreds of thousands of DC residents don’t even own a car. Hundreds of thousands more do, but use transit, biking and walking for some of their trips already. Most people are happy to leave the car at home when the alternatives are safe, affordable, and convenient, but currently only certain routes meet that criteria. Setting a goal to get District residents and visitors out of their cars by offering them equal or better options is a winning formula.

More than just traffic violence

Forty people dead a year is the gruesome tip of the rapidly-melting iceberg. Carbon emissions from personal vehicles are a top driver of the climate crisis; in DC, they make up 20% of our total emissions, and are the single-biggest day-to-day contributor to the average American’s carbon footprint. Carbon emissions from driving one’s personal vehicle have about three times the impact of eating meat, and far outstrip behaviors like not recycling or using energy inefficient lightbulbs.

It’s sensible, then, that DC’s plan to be carbon-neutral by 2050 is relying on a massive change in transportation habits to get there. Over 50% of the reductions we are planning for are supposed to come from transit, walking, and biking replacing car trips.

What’s more, fossil-fuel emissions are only one form of car pollution. Particle pollution from tires, brakes, and road wear “directly contribute[s] to well over half of particle pollution from road transport.” Experts are increasingly paying attention to the serious physiological damage caused by noise pollution. And in DC, like other American cities, histories of segregationist land use and urban-renewal policies mean that all those carbon emissions from personal vehicles disproportionately pollute the air that Black and Brown families breathe. Addressing these racial inequities means specifically curbing excessive driving through less wealthy and less white neighborhoods.

Accounting for the much more far-ranging medium-term health impacts, and the existential threat of the climate crisis, we can’t afford to lose any more years to false promises. Time is running out on our tweaks around the edges. The only credible option left is to reduce car trips by identifying a meaningful goal, and quickly adjusting District policies to achieve it.