Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about various urban issues affecting America’s cities and I’ve been thinking specifically about how our cities have been designed for speeding hunks of metal (cars). I recently read the 10th anniversary edition of Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, which lays out ten rules for designing city spaces for people, not cars. It includes several updated chapters that reflect on some of his predictions and how the COVID-pandemic era has affected cities.
Along with the book, my thoughts on walkability, bikeability and other urban issues has been influenced by my own 2023 desire to be more sustainable. To that end, I’m planning to track how many miles I’ve walked or biked to replace car trips, and I’m also tracking my vehicle miles traveled (VMT) this year. As of this writing, my VMT is around 208, I’ve biked 26 miles, and I’ve walked 13 miles. Yikes. My eyes got really big when I saw my VMT so far for January. Where are those VMTs coming from?! The places we live play a huge role in our default mode of transportation. It pains me to see my VMT so high and it pains me to say this….but right now it does look like the car is a default mode of travel right now.
This is a roundabout way of talking about the Vision Zero research project. Vision Zero, as I detailed in a previous post, has as its goal the elimination of all severe injuries and fatalities on roadways. My particular interest is in the severe injuries and deaths of pedestrians and bicyclists. The ability of pedestrians and bicyclists to walk or ride safely in their city or neighborhood ties into many other issues around mobility access, equity and public health that I’m interested in exploring in the future.
What I’ve been working on for the last few weeks is compiling data from every city in the United States that has a Vision Zero Action Plan that has been reviewed and certified by the Vision Zero Network. The idea behind this project is to see how effective cities with Vision Zero action plans have been at reducing pedestrian and cyclist severe injuries and fatalities in their communities. Vision Zero policies have made a huge difference in Europe but it remains to be seen if similar improvements can happen here in the United States. Granted, many cities in the US have only implemented action plans within the last 3–5 years, so it may take a little longer for improvements in injury and fatality rates to appear in the data.
A big reason I started this project is to try and organize all the relevant crash data in one place. The Vision Zero Network is a great place to find a list of cities committed to the endeavor, and it also explains how the Network evaluates cities’ action plans. But what I really want is crash data.
Crash data typically comprises of all accidents that law-enforcement responded to and includes the type of vehicles involved in the crash. Some cities have data portals, which can be easy to use and have all the necessary data. Other cities have limited data portals and I’ve had to navigate state DOT portals to try and access data. With all the data located in one central repository, it’ll make life easier for any future researchers or advocates that may be interested in studying Vision Zero.
With the crash data for the cities certified by the Vision Zero Network, I plan to analyze the data gathered and identify trends in the crash data available before and after cities committed to Vision Zero. It’s well known that, as a whole, serious and fatal crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists have continued to rise over the last decade. I believe that cities are the true laboratory of democracy in the United States, so any significant change in this deadly trend will be seen at the city level.
I’m excited about where this project is going even though I have a pretty pessimistic hypothesis — Even in cities with a certified Action Plan, there will be no significant decrease in crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians. Granted, it may take more than 3–5 for any meaningful difference to appear in the data. With that in mind, I envision this project being a continuous process for a long time.
In terms of technical details — I’m currently working on a spreadsheet that includes every US city with a certified Vision Zero Action plan, the year they announced they were committed to Vision Zero, the years data is available and the data source. Some cities have their own crash data and other data I’m getting from state DOT sites. Once I have the data in csv format, I’m adding it to my GitHub project. Any analysis code will be hosted there, as well.
If anyone would like to collaborate, please reach out! I think that this project has a broad appeal to anyone interested in urban equity and urban policy issues. To connect, you can find me on LinkedIn & Mastodon (@jackturek708).