People drive like maniacs. Let's treat them accordingly

if there was a product on the market that killed on the order of 50 000 Americans a year and disabled hundreds of thousands more you'd assume the government would do something about it well there is such a product it's been around for over a hundred years and the problems are getting worse not better all about cars Vision zero and safety measures that actually work coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome and I get a lot of requests to talk about safety and vision zero and this one from stencilized is a good example maybe you could talk about Vision zero and which cities have actually made progress on traffic safety because it's clearly going in the wrong direction in a lot of cities yeah I'm not going to make a top 10 list out of this because even I'm not that in crass okay let's talk bit about Vision zero because I don't want to assume everyone knows what that is even though nearly every U.S city of any size has a vision zero plan at this point and it's easy to be cynical about these they're often filled with the kind of squishy language and just really generic looking infographics that seem like they were designed to insult your intelligence but Vision zero really is more than that the idea has its roots in Sweden in the 1990s and the idea is kind of a paradigm shift grown because historically when we analyze Transportation projects we do some level of analysis where we quantify all the benefits and the costs in terms of dollars even death and injury Vision zero rejects this and says that you can't trade off human life and health against like travel time benefits it also takes a systems approach meaning everything isn't dependent on each individual's quote unquote personal responsibility it recognizes that people are fallible and they do stupid careless things but the penalty for doing something stupid shouldn't be their own or another person's injury or death but it also does go into a lot of stuff about how multi-disciplinary and complexities and how you need to do a lot of stakeholder involvement and I wasn't planning for a long time and when you read stuff like this what it usually means is nothing's ever going to happen but look some cities are making progress internationally for sure but even in the US we have cities that are making progress ironically or maybe not ironically it seems like a prerequisite for eliminating pedestrian deaths is just having pound for pound the densest most walkable city in the country not to jinx it but Hoboken New Jersey has now had zero traffic deaths in four years I kind of want to do a deeper dive on Hoboken next time I get to New York but we can street view a lot of the things that the city has done daylighting Corners meaning you delineate the space within 25 or 30 feet of a crosswalk to make sure drivers and pedestrians can see each other using paint and flexible posts or using paint to visually tighten up the churning radii at intersections and the city has reprogrammed its signals to include leading pedestrian intervals which get The Pedestrian out into the crosswalk and visible before it gives cars the green light which I can't really show you in street view you'll just have to imagine it I don't want to Discount anything the city of Hoboken has done it's fantastic work but let's be serious it's a lot easier to get to zero and Hoboken than it is in like Dallas so maybe the solution is to just add housing density to all our cities until they hit like 50 000 people per square mile so people are walking everywhere clogging up traffic and you actually have a constituency to support the kinds of things Hoboken is doing but really even what we think of as Progressive cities aren't making much progress and I sometimes wonder if just our whole mental model of what needs to be done to reduce severe and fatal collisions is misguided it's always framed as a bunch of infrastructure changes that all cajole drivers into slowing down and paying more attention like here's the thing you'll almost always see in a vision zero effort a map like this that comes out of the crash analysis and it's often called something like a high Injury Network corridors where they're a disproportionate number of severe injuries and fatalities and these maps of high injury networks are almost always basically indistinguishable from a map of a city's strodes it's essentially a map of arterials that function more as highways than proper Urban streets with high speeds and terrible to no accommodation for anyone not driving a car related you'll see different versions of this graphic everywhere a vision zero approach will often recommend a maximum of 20 miles per hour in areas where there are potential conflicts between cars and people walking which is basically what 99 of urban areas which goes to the heart of what I want to talk about today which is we know reducing speeds just basically makes everything better Reaction Time stopping distance crash severity but most Vision zero plans struggle with this sort of chicken and egg situation around traffic speeds the dominant school of thought says drivers don't really pay attention to speed limits rather they respond to physical cues in the driving environment if lanes are wide and it feels like a highway they'll drive on it like it's a highway so reducing speed limits without fixing the infrastructure itself is considered a waste of time this to me is actually the same mindset as the 85th percentile speed rule which says that you should do a speed steady and then set the posted speed based on how fast the 85th percentile vehicle is going I feel like we should be expecting better than this sort of circular logic from people are getting paid professional level salaries but I'm weird like that and look the streets where most of the Carnage is happening are pretty far gone they can be fixed and they should be but it's expensive so change is slow if it happens at all thankfully we have a solution and we've known about it for at least 100 years you see in the 1920s there were Mass protests when cars started appearing on the streets and running people over now this is not an official urbanist book recommendation but I was in the middle of reading Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos which honestly isn't a flex it's just how it is it's from 1925 and there are entire scenes in the book that take place around traffic fatalities and Street safety protests this was a time when there was still outrage and public debate over cars and how to deal with with them and I guess what we settled on as a society was just making it illegal to walk across the street until drivers gave you permission to do so but in that short time where there was a debate one of the solutions that was on the table was just to physically limit cars to speeds that were compatible with the busy Urban environment you'd think the idea of a speed Governor or speed limiter is relatively new like it's a Twist on adaptive cruise control but some form of speed governing technology has always been around in fact in 1923 speed Governors ended up on the ballot in Cincinnati Ohio in a city referendum that asked voters to decide whether to limit cars to 20 miles per hour within City Limits which sounds like common sense but you can imagine the opposition was well funded and I think this is the last time we've ever seen speed Governors on and any ballot anywhere fast forward to last week Jennifer amundy chair of the national Transportation safety board actually talked about speed governors in her keynote address at the nacto conference on May 15th nothing too crazy but she talked about incentivizing car manufacturers to adopt speed limiting technology and she mentioned that the Federal Motor Carrier safety administration had already begun rule making on speed limiters for large trucks so there is awareness of this at the federal level and you see a little bit of movement at the local level too New York City recently did a pilot project where they put active intelligence speed Assistance or Isa in 50 fleet vehicles and monitored them the vehicles drove over 130 000 miles and records show they traveled quote unquote within speed limit parameters 99 of the time which probably puts the them in the 99th percentile of drivers from my experience the city says the technology also accounted for a 36 percent reduction in hard-breaking events and those are often indicators of unsafe driving no surprise European governments are latching onto this technology in a big way I'm just going to recommend this David's zipper piece from Bloomberg and Link it down in the description like all this stuff it's really well written and well sourced with lots of very tasty hyperlinks okay implementing speed Governors may sound like a slam dunk but you can imagine there are some objections so in a minute I'm gonna do what I can to address those but first customary pause to suggest that you like and subscribe if you're a fan of reasonable speed limits and the people who respect them usual ways to connect on the apps and direct support on patreon is appreciated if you want to support the contra reversial notion that people dying on our transportation system is bad and we should be doing things to stop it okay obviously the way New York City managed speeds on its pilot project is not how we manage speeds as a society instead we entrust every individual driver to make their own personal decision on how fast to drive and I'd suggest to you that what people are thinking about when they make that decision isn't what's the safest thing for all the people around me but what's the likelihood I'm gonna get a ticket being able to drive as fast as you possibly can without getting pulled over is like a national Pastime it's like a treasured freedom and the whole idea of a speed Governor just threatens to take that freedom away I mean don't get me wrong I can imagine all sorts of extremely realistic scenarios where exceeding the speed limit is an absolute necessity like if I suddenly find myself being pursued by the cast of the Fast and the Furious franchise or if someone in the next Lane just looks at me the wrong way while I'm driving and I have to engage in a high speed chase so I can confront them I'm just not sure how all that's going to work with speed governors keep in mind though the government does all kinds of things like this already where they say we're sure you all mean well but we're going to put in some safeguards just in case someone gets careless which is a thing that's known to happen with humans like your appliances have these Underwriters Laboratory stickers on them meaning they meet standards that help ensure that you won't burn down your whole apartment building or you're not allowed to buy certain pesticides that are known to be harmful to kids or the environment and you cannot buy lawn darts and apparently you can't go more than like 18 miles an hour on an e-scooter because that might be dangerous yeah we do put speed Governors on e-scooters because that's a safety problem but four thousand pound Vehicles going like 60 miles an hour on city streets yeah that's just as God intended so if we were losing 40 to 50 000 people a year to leaks from nuclear reactors the government would be taking pretty Swift action if we were losing that many people to terrorist attacks we'd probably create an entirely new government apparatus to deal with it if we were losing that many people in plane crashes we'd ground air traffic until we figured it out but for whatever reason we've decided 40 to 50 000 people dying every year is an acceptable trade-off for everyone being able to drive just as fast as they personally feel comfortable driving which is completely fine because everyone I've ever met is of course an above average driver and that's all I've got thanks for joining today and thanks as always to the patrons for helping to ensure that I can continue to make videos about whatever it is I want to make a video about every week the direct support does mean a lot keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 118,091

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, vision zero, speed governors, speed limiters, speed limiters on cars

Id: vBSkLrYbLk0

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023