Imagine you live in a place where you see people driving their cars, walking on sidewalks, and riding their bicycles. Seems fairly normal and common-place, right? Now imagine you turn on the local news at 7:00 PM and you make it through the nightly broadcast without hearing about some horrific traffic accident or another pedestrian/bicyclist killed on the streets of your city. Maybe the news anchors have features like how the city managed to put in protected bike lanes on a busy road, or maybe the transportation department took away one lane of a roadway and put in a bus-only lane with its own stoplights to make bus travel more efficient. Perhaps the city made their sidewalks safer and more accessible by ensuring a good 5–6 feet of separation between the curb and the street, and added some trees to boot. Of course, accidents are bound to happen. People are people and make mistakes, sometimes catastrophic ones. But in this city, maybe they don’t happen so frequently and cause so much damage to people and their families.
The scenario above is essentially the goal of Vision Zero, a project to eliminate all traffic fatalities and injuries from roadways for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. If it seems like a very progressive and idealistic project, maybe you would not be surprised to learn that Vision Zero was first initiated in Sweden, in the late 1990s.
Sweden’s parliament introduced a bill stating that no person should be killed or injured while using the country’s road system and that Sweden’s road and transport networks should be redesigned and configured to meet this goal. Other Scandinavian countries followed suit, such as Norway, where cars are mostly banned from the city center of Oslo and there are state-wide vehicle speed limits. Vision Zero took off across Europe, with many other countries signing on to the initiative and working to get traffic fatalities under control.
Within the EU bloc as a whole, traffic fatalities have dropped significantly over the last 20 years. There 51,400 traffic fatalities in 2001, decreasing to 18,800 in 2020. There was an increase in 2021, as COVID-19 lockdowns were lifted and people began to travel more, the road fatalities in 2021 were still below pre-pandemic levels.
This isn’t just one or two countries that are carrying the load on Vision Zero Europe, either. As of 2021, there were an average of 44 road deaths per million residents in the EU-member bloc, which is a 5-percent increase from 2020 but an overall 13-percent reduction from 2019. Sweden, the originator of Vision Zero, had 18 road deaths per million in 2021, followed by Denmark with 23 and Ireland with 27 road deaths per million.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) released its Early Estimates of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities and Fatality Rate by Sub-Categories in 2021 in May of this year. Don’t judge this report by its long, bureaucratic-sounding title. Inside the report are some pretty stark numbers regarding how dangerous US roads can be. NHTSA’s early estimate of traffic fatalities in 2021 came in at 42,915 people, a 10.5-percent increase from 2020. An even starker number is an estimate of 124 road deaths per 100,000 residents, much higher than many members of the EU-member bloc.
What’s interesting about looking at the above graph is that the US actually has had less traffic fatalities than the EU-member bloc. In fact, there’s a significant downward trend in traffic fatalities right up to about 2012. Since then, traffic fatalities have been on a steady rise and will likely keep climbing for the foreseeable future.
Obviously, there are some significant differences between the United States and European countries, starting with the size. Many member states of the EU are smaller than many states in the US. A higher population is likely to result in more drivers on the road and thus more road accidents. Many cities in Europe are more compact, denser and utilize more public transit modes for moving people around. The US, on the other hand, has undergone significant surburbanization the last 50–60 years. This has resulted in housing developments segregated from places like downtown districts, entertainment districts, restaurants and stores, many of which can only be reached by car.
Cities in the United States started to really catch on to Vision Zero in the early 2010s. Chicago announced in 2012 that it was committed to Vision Zero and many other cities soon added their names to the list. As of August 2022, 45 communities across the US have officially committed to Vision Zero and have actionable plans to achieve this policy goal. I’m planning in future posts on Vision Zero to look at how well some of these cities have achieved their policy goals and what the results have been.
While Vision Zero as a policy tool has had major success in the EU, it still seems like a pie-in-the-sky dream here in the United States. Political intractability, the vastness of the country, the automotive industry, the oil & gas industry and many other factors all combine to keep Americans in cars. Cars are still marketed as a way toward personal independence (a very strong American trait), as status symbols, as safe havens from the demands of the outside world.
But what better way to experience your city, or your neighborhood, or your environment, than getting out of your car to walk or bike, and feeling safe while doing so?
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/2021-road-safety-statistics-what-behind-figures_en