Cities across America have been trying — and mostly failing — to achieve Vision Zero for more than a decade. But is it really time to trade the goal of ending road deaths and serious injuries for the aim of reducing them 30 percent by 2030? And would we be better positioned to eliminate the other 70 percent of fatalities if we made that strategic shift, or not?
Today on the Brake, we sit down with the president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, David Harkey, to talk about his organization’s pivot to push for a five-year full-court press on traffic violence, and why he doesn’t believe that means giving up on ending road deaths overall.
And along the way, Streetsblog’s Kea Wilson presses him to examine what strategies would really rise to the surface if we set a tighter time horizon for more modest road safety gains, and why we have to sweat our strategy when it comes to saving lives.
Streetsblog: Just to kind of catch folks up, why don’t you unpack for me a little bit more about what you mean when you say that “Vision Zero seems like little more than a noble idea in the United States,” and what inspired you to write this essay?
David Harkey: So this all started a few years ago when we started looking back at the data a decade or so ago, and thinking about our strategic plan and where we’re going to go as an organization in terms of accomplishing our mission, which is to save lives and prevent harm on our roadways. And as you start to look back in history, you realize we hit a low point in fatalities in this country in 2014: we were just under 33,000 fatalities. Then in 2021, it was around 43,000; as we moved forward into the next year, it was over 43,000.
So for us, [the question] was: What’s not working? Clearly the various forms of Vision Zero that have been around about that same length of time haven’t moved the needle. We just have not gone in a direction that is putting us on a trajectory towards zero. So we need a reset.
And that was kind of the whole point behind our strategic plan: thinking through, how do we reset this? And I pitched this idea to my team of, look: fatalities have gone up 30 percent in a course of a decade. Let’s put a goal on the table. Let’s put a marker on the table and say we want to take fatalities down by 30 percent by 2030. That’s very aggressive. It’s very ambitious, but at the same time, I feel like it’s aspirational. So let’s see if we can do this.
Now, of course, we can’t do that alone. We’re going to have to have lots of partners, and we can get into the details of how we think we’re going to go about doing that. But the goal here was not to say we’re not interested in going toward zero fatalities. That’s still the ultimate goal. The key here is we’ve got to turn this ship around. We have been going in the wrong direction for a decade, and so if we’re going to get to zero, let’s set this interim target. Let’s turn the ship around, let’s get that 30-percent reduction by 2030, and then figure out what the next steps are beyond that to get us to zero.
Streetsblog: I think one of my reservations about this idea is just the types of solutions are likely to rise to the surface in a US context if you set a goal to reduce fatalities in under five years. Would this approach privilege solutions like enforcement and education that might not be as impactful in all circumstances over infrastructure and vehicle safety improvements that would take a lot longer? I think when you start having people chase certain time horizons, would that discourage them from pursuing those visionary projects, at least in the context of a US development landscape where it just takes forever to do that stuff?
Harkey: You’re exactly right. I mean, infrastructure projects take a long time from the time of they are conceived to their planning till you get through all of the right away issues and sometimes legal challenges.
Same thing on the vehicle side. We’re talking about things right now when it comes to automatic emergency braking systems that will benefit pedestrians. We’ve got new tests that we’re going to be rolling in shortly that are going to address cyclists. And so these things take time, because they have to to be put on the vehicle, then they have to be purchased by the customer, and the fleet has to turn over. And we know the average age of a vehicle is about 12 years.
And so it’s going to take a long time even for automatic emergency braking, which is a system that we helped accelerate through our voluntary commitment way back in 2016. But we know that it’s likely going to be out into 2040 before we see 90 plus percent of the vehicles on the roadway that are actually going to have that technology.
It’s the long game that you’re playing with some of these interventions. You have to keep that in mind. You also have to keep in mind that there are some things — and the vehicle side is, is a good place to think about this — that you that we started on a decade ago or more, right, that are now paying big dividends today. Things that we started on [years ago] will be part of that 30-percent reduction that we’re aiming for in the next five years.
Same thing for infrastructure. There are things that are being accelerated as DOTs, for example, have become more likely to put in roundabouts. Back in 93, the first US modern roundabouts went into place; 30 years later, we now have 1000s of roundabouts around the country, and they are accelerating in terms of their pace of implementation.
Anything that we’re thinking about today is going to take a long time. But at the same time, we’ve already started doing things that are going to be beneficial from a safety standpoint, and we’ve just got to make sure that we continue to accelerate the implementation of those now where we can get the biggest bang for our buck right away.
Yes, we want to work on the infrastructure. Yes, we want to work on vehicle technologies. But we know we have to change policies in some cases, when it comes to impairment, when it comes to speeding, when it comes to distraction; all of those are things that if we change policies in some way, we can have a more immediate impact on road safety.
Now, that’s not easy either. Nothing we’re talking about is easy. But that’s an area where possibly you can do more; you can get bigger safety benefits more rapidly than in some of the other areas.
