Let’s get serious about stopping road fatalities and injuries

Vision Zero is a paradigm shift in approaching traffic safety.

By Steve Price

November has been a trying time for our area with multiple collisions between cars and pedestrians. Cities around the world are committing to futures where such tragedies are rare or never by adopting Vision Zero policies that include a Safe System Approach. Transportation planning in the past would assign a dollar value on an individual human life and then decide if the dollar cost of saving individuals was worth the cost of additional transportation improvements. Vision Zero says saving lives is always worth it. The Safe System Approach prioritizes human life by designing safer streets, lowering travel speeds, making vehicles less deadly, and not putting the burden of safety on non-car users of streets.

A criticism of the Safe Systems Approach is that it doesn’t advocate for the reduction of car use, which itself reduces the public costs of making streets safer. Replacing short car trips with walking or bicycling is often a big cost savings to cities, especially if land use planning puts destinations close to where people live. This reduces the amount of travel time on high-speed routes with high crash rates and reduces the cost of public infrastructure that otherwise is stretched to provide services to things far apart.

The best approach is two pronged: (1) design streets and vehicles for greater safety following the Safe System Approach and (2) distinguish between near trips and far trips; those which require heavy, fast vehicles that can go long distances; and those trips that can be accomplished nearby with walking, bicycling, and transit.

Vision Zero has been adopted by about 75 cities across the United States and 1,200 worldwide, with mixed results. It’s easy to adopt it as a slogan, but pushback can come when it involves removing parking or slowing down cars. Nevertheless, U.S. cities such as Hoboken and Jersey City have seen dramatic declines in pedestrian deaths following their Vision Zero policies. In Europe, Oslo, Norway, had zero pedestrian deaths in 2023 in a population of 700,000; and Helsinki, Finland, had zero pedestrian death in 12 months in 2024-25 in a population of 690,000.

The Safe System approach takes a multipronged approach to preventing road accidents.