Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[MacBerry]

It’s not an exclusive choice we have to make.  We can (and do!) do both.  But if you have a low usage intersection that is producing a relatively large number of fatalities there - we should look at that!  There’s more likely to be low hanging fruit changes that can be made there.  

Remember, our resources are limited and perfection is impossible.

People in Sweden are willing to kill people. That why they still have a lot of fatalities (in an absolute sense) from roads and are in no way close to actually having zero fatalities.

You can’t give the majority of a population complete control over a high mass device that can travel at speeds of 100km/h or more and actually think there’s a way to never have fatalities.  Sorry.

Edit: Reading the other posts it seems pretty clear this isn’t worth continuing.  I think peoples actions reflect their beliefs and not the words they use.  Semantics means little to me if it doesn’t change actions.  Sweden can *say* they don’t accept casualties but their actual actions don’t reflect that.

As for the barrier idea, it’s probablu a good idea in many places here.  It’s probably a bad idea in many other places.  It again comes down to a cost/benefit analysis.

The important thing about #visionzero isn't so much about having zero fatalities. It's more about shifting the way we think about our built environment, how we operate within it, and our response to fatalities. ie. it's more about cultural change leading to changes in the built environment. I don't know if it's origins come from industry, but it's definitely the approach to safety I've seen in industry. The goal is to change the thinking so that building a safe environment is always present in our minds. Every decision that is made about how infrastructure is built has some sort of affect on the safety of its users, and there should be an awareness of that at all stages of the process and methodologies and standards should be continuously revised and improved to reflect what we have learned from past incidents.

It may seem like a subtle difference, but I think it can have pretty significant effects. No one goes out trying to build something that may contribute to a fatality at a later date, but that is different than actively trying to build something that minimizes casualties. As an example, I don't think slip ramps would be built on non-separated roadways if a #visionzero culture existed. They are objectively less safe for all road users and are a relic of an approach to engineering roadways that first focused on efficient car movement, I'm guessing in response to the 70s oil crisis, and then secondarily on things like safety.

The whole King Street Bike Lanes saga is an excellent example of how #visionzero thinking was not applied. Engineers and planners argued against full separation and pointed out that the lanes supposedly represented best practices. Understanding the situation on the ground and the North American context we are working in should have made it clear that those best practices might not be the best practices in North America. But it seems that instead of thinking about risks and ways to mitigate them independently, they blindly followed some sort of published standard. The industry analogy, I think, would be for a worker to blindly follow procedures without independently assessing the risk.

I like to come back to the Transportation Commissioner statement along the lines of #visionzero being untenable because it would lead to too many traffic delays (or something along those lines) as I think it really demonstrates how he is unqualified to lead his department within the modern understanding of transportation planning. It entirely misses the point of what #visionzero is. It's an understanding of fatalities as a parameter in the design, and if you set fatalities = 0, the design doesn't work. Instead, the approach should be that we have to engineer a solution to a problem (intersection, for example) - how now can we engineer it safely? I'm adding a stop light, what does that mean for safety? I'm adding a left-turn lane, what does that mean for safety?

This type of thinking already exists in engineering in terms of efficiency. Efficient traffic movement is a primary variable that they are designing for and constantly trying to improve. Safety is a secondary variable that they need to keep within an acceptable level. Most improvements are made at a broader standards level instead of continually every day on the ground. #visionzero simply means that safety becomes one of the primary factors they engineer for. It allows for an environment where safety continually improves instead of one where safety remains at a status quo.

Moderator: Can we move all the self righteous discussion thread high-jacked to another thread and leave the general highway discussion thread to the less philosophical readers.