Blaming Zero Vision

Zero is a special number.

-Brett Weinstein

Vision Zero is a traffic safety program originally from Sweden with a goal to eliminate all fatalities and serious injuries from the roadway network. Proponents of the program tend to favor the redesigning of the roadway network on a mass scale, typically paying no attention to the monetary costs or any other trade offs.

Governments all across the world have adopted program, many hard date goals akin to net zero carbon pledges. In 2012 for example, both Los Angeles and Chicago made Vision Zero pledges with the goal to have obtained such a status within a decade. Other cities in have done the same with similar time commitments despite some of the original proponants warning about date committments and their definition of zero writing, “Zero is not a target to be achieved by a certain date. It is a change from an emphasis on current problems and possible ways of reducing these to being guided by what the optimum state of the road transport system should be.”

The Vision Zero demands dogmatically, “it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system.” This sets quite the bar for its cheerleaders and a great platform for turning the program into a moral vision meaning those who even offer the slightest critque of anything tangentally associated with Vision Zero are cast as immoral.

So far, no city has yet to achieve Vision Zero status unless one is to consider the case of Hokoken, but it comes with significant caveats. Politicians, bureaucrats, and other associated individuals such as those in the non-profit sector seldom pay for being wrong.

Within the toolbox for Vision Zero are reduced speed limits, removal and narrowing of traffic lanes, inclusion of specific travel lanes for bicycling or public transit. Given that serious injuries and fatalities tend to be almost a given to road users who travel outside motor vehicles (cycling, walking), these tools are primarily used to address motor vehicle driving.

These tools can be beneficial in certain contexts but devastating in others. Vision Zero supporters often endorse dangerous segregated bicycle lanes which they call “protected.” The Sierra Nevada town of Paradise reduced the capacity of the town’s main road from four lanes to two as part of a so-called “road diet,” a common tool in the Vision Zero toolbox that often also often brings door zone bicycle lanes. That road diet along with ones on two more streets in Paradise, concluded a Butte County Grand Jury, hindered the residents of the area from evacuating safely and quickly during said town’s 2018 wildfire, one of the deadlist in state history. Denver apparently saw a 33 percent jump in fatalities, mainly among pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists, after adopting their Vision Zero program. Other cities such as Portland, with a high homelessness population, many suffering from drug addiction and mental illnesses, saw increases as well and Portland Police have confirmed a large number of those fatalities were from that population. Calling any of this “ethically acceptable” is delusional.

Vision Zero and its effectiveness was recently discussed on a California cycling message board in the context of thirty-seven year old Kenny DeForest, a stand up comedian based in NYC, who died in a bicycle crash last week. According to NYPD, via an NPC News article, he crashed into an unoccupied parked car while using a Citi-Bike.

Few other details are available at the moment such as time of day, or whether DeForest was intoxicated or distracted, his cycling skill level, or whether he had some other issue that led to the collision such as a mechanical problem with his bicycle that caused him to lose control. All of these are factors that likely could not be addressed with even the most comprehensive Vision Zero treatment.

Citing the fatality, one user wrote the following:

This is why I’m so skeptical of “Vision Zero”.  To start, how do we eliminate solo crash fatalities like this one?

R.I.P. 37yo comedian Kenny DeForest. 

The comment stabs at something critical: the almost Blank Slate approach pushed by the Vision Zero dogma: it’s impossible to design a system that will encourage or force all human beings of all ages, skillsets, etc, to behave according to the will of the system’s designer.

Any attempt to discuss such within the eyes and ears of certain bicycling activists, most notably those two above amount to a taboo.

Two replies went as such:

…Please help me connect the dots. Why does this particular crash have anything to do with Vision Zero?

Happy Holidays!

And:

…Victim blame much?  Reminds me of your comments about Octavia.  (?  SD concrete truck willing bicycle commuter.)

Where do these delusional views originate?

As hinted in Her Name was Maia, it’s largely driven by Woke ideology.

Platitude-driven bicycling advocates tend to adhere to the Woke³ religion too, with its tenants mapping well onto onto Shellenberger and Peter Boghossian ‘s chart, Woke Religion: A Taxonomy.

There’s original sin (motor vehicle usage, suburbia, Capitalism, even white supremacy / whiteness , white supremacy again), guilty devils (“drivers”, “vehicular cyclists”, straight white men, old white men, old white men again), myths (streetcar conspiracy, Robert Moses’ racist bridges, general 1619-Project type historical revisionism), sacred victims (“people who bicycle/walk/roll” “intersectionality”), The Elect (bicycle non-profits, Streetsblog, NACTO, People for Bikes, LAB), taboo speech (traffic accident, personal responsibility), purifying rituals (“die-ins”, saving the planet, Vision Zero) and purifying speech (“crash, not accident” “traffic violence” “transportation/mobility justice”).

Questioning the fact that some humans will behave outside “the norm”, whether it’s intoxicated homeless people walking in front of motorists at night, or an unfortunate solo bicycle collision into a parked car, is unacceptable in this vision.

Both of these individual are being disingenious and the labeling of the original poster as someone blaming a victim is an abuse tactic common with those with Cluster B character disorders.

They both know better. One is the editor of a cycling magazine and the other an ex-bureaucrat from the “active transportation” division of the state’s DOT.

They know exactly what Vision Zero is and what proponents of the program want.