Vision Zero traffic safety program a failure, reader says
Q
Vision Zero’s war on major city streets arterials has been a failure.
— Chris DiPrima, San Francisco
A
Vision Zero is the statewide program intended to make our streets safer for all users — motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians. Today, Chris holds the microphone with a dissenting view.
Q
The shelter-at-home orders have given us the opportunity to evaluate the effects of massive, rapid changes in the use of our transportation system. The results of this giant experiment are trickling in, and they are proving that years of speed-slowing measures on arterials and disinvestment in freeway capacity have increased the risk of vehicle crashes, not decreased it.
— Chris DiPrima
A
Really? Driving slower is a bad idea?
Q
Since the dawn of the Vision Zero movement, pedestrian advocates have insisted that slowing traffic will have a positive effect on safety. Their logic has been that because lowerspeed crashes are more survivable than higher-speed crashes, the best course is to slow everyone down as much as possible.
This effort has removed lanes, restricted turns, shortened traffic signals, etc. But the natural result of slowing traffic is that motorists look for shortcuts, usually on parallel neighborhood streets, which were never designed to be thoroughfares.
— Chris DiPrima
A
Then along came COVID-19 and stay-athome orders, and traffic virtually disappeared.
Q
It should be obvious that this has turned arterials into a Hobbesian war of all against all. It makes road users aware that they have limited time to make it through each intersection and they take more risks to ensure that they can clear intersections.
It becomes more advantageous for motorists to avoid certain intersections. This, in turn, increases the number of turning movements required. As the number of turns increases, the number of vehicle-vehicle, vehicle-bicycle and vehicle-pedestrian conflict points can lead to an increase in crashes.
The answer to this problem is that Vision Zero must abandon its war on arterial streets. Those streets should be designed to increase vehicle throughput, thus reducing diversion onto other streets. They should encourage straight-through driving, rather than the multitude of turns now required to optimize travel time.
Rather than blindly applying traffic-slowing measures in neighborhoods, we should identify shortcutting as a symptom of a failure of our arterial street system and make real fixes to those facilities. And yes, in some cases, that will mean expanding streets so that more people can drive on them. But the result will be neighborhood streets much more like the ones that Vision Zero advocates lionize: streets that serve all users at the pace of life.
— Chris DiPrima
A
I think, Chris, you may be starting an intense Roadshow debate.