Why Do Americans View Zero Road Deaths as an Impossible Goal?

Central Boston is actually more densely inhabited than central Oslo. The most visible difference between the two cities, though, is the relative absence in Oslo of the light-blue suburban blob that surrounds Boston.

It's in that suburban blob that Vision Zero becomes politically intolerable, because the land-use pattern is entirely designed around 30 to 70 mph travel. The houses are far apart, with big lots. The street networks are circuitous. The shopping, office, and residential areas are all isolated from each other. If you suddenly imposed 20 mile-per-hour travel in this environment, you would actually be dramatically impeding people's ability to get where they want to go in an amount of time they're willing to spend. If you could wave a wand and do so overnight—say, by putting a speed limiter on everyone's cars—you'd incite riots in no time.

(Vision Zero also receives political pushback in America's dense urban cores, because we've configured them to accommodate suburban car commuters. To a large extent, in fact, we've configured our urban transportation systems to prioritize access for car commuters over the safety and comfort of those who actually live in urban neighborhoods.)

It's not speed itself—the feeling of moving fast—that we're wedded to, I don't think. Not so much that we value it over other people's lives. It's our time that is so precious to us we’re often willing to sacrifice safety for it. It's our ability to go about the day and get everything we need to done in a reasonable duration. The great tragedy of the American postwar development pattern is that we've built a world where a productive life is only possible if we do our daily travel at truly crazy, historically unprecedented speeds. These are speeds that make doing everything by car (with the attendant risk of injury or death, to yourself or others) the unavoidable ante to participating productively in society.

As urban living has undergone a renaissance in the past two decades, that political pushback has become surmountable in those places in America where speed is, in fact, not necessary to live a productive life. And there has emerged a strong constituency for the kinds of moves Oslo has taken to pursue a goal of no road deaths. (Witness, for example, San Francisco's recent decision to fully ban private cars from Market Street, or Manhattan's implementation of congestion pricing. And even much less dense, transit-friendly downtowns are rolling out things like protected bike lanes at a record pace.)

In the suburbs, though—or in younger U.S. cities where even the core is much more car-oriented—it's a different question. The idea of only slow travel remains unimaginable, and so Vision Zero seems unimaginable. The vast majority of places built after about 1970 (arguably more like 1945, but let's be charitable) cease to function, in their current configuration, if you can only drive 20 miles per hour.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/39DZEZ3