Oslo, Norway, population 718,000, first achieved Vision Zero in 2019. In fact, there are over 1,000 cities globally that have succeeded in the Vision Zero goal of eliminating all fatal and serious injury crashes. From a Forbes story in May about Vision Zero:
An interactive world map, updated and re-released earlier this month by DEKRA, a company based in Germany that conducts automotive testing, inspection and crash research, shows 1,273 cities in 26 countries that have attained the goal of zero traffic fatalities in at least one year. Some cities did so for multiple years.
Which begs the question: why did The San Francisco Standard run "Pedestrian deaths refuse to fall. Some blame the pedestrians," a story over the Thanksgiving break that treated Vision Zero as if it's a fantastical goal. The piece even amplified people who claim, wrongly, that inattentive pedestrians are the reason Vision Zero can never work. From Max Harrison-Caldwell's story, quoting Richard Brandi, a resident of West Portal, location of a horrific crash last spring that wiped out a family of four:
Brandi does not expect traffic deaths to ever disappear. But how many each year?
“I don’t know what the number should be,” Brandi said. “But it’s a utopia to think it’s going to be zero.”
There's nothing wrong, in principle, with doing a story quoting ignorant people who think that it's impossible to actually eliminate traffic fatalities in a city over the course of a year. However, a journalist who does that is obligated to include real-world facts for context. And the simple fact is that Vision Zero is achievable. We know this, because, as mentioned, it's been achieved in multiple cities.
This is an ongoing problem with journalism generally in the U.S., but it's especially acute in the safe-and-livable streets realm. Many journalists and editors seem to think "showing both sides" means just quoting people with different opinions. But that's half the job. The other half is to provide the facts and context.
This isn't to pick on the Standard. In "When Journalists Give Even Intentional Traffic Violence a Pass," Streetsblog USA's editor Kea Wilson called out The New York Times for a story that tried to partially pin the murder of cyclist Paul Varry by a motorist as somehow a result of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo's work to build out a network of protected bike lanes. This is the height of absurdity and windshield bias; Varry was hit and then intentionally run down by a driver in a section of unprotected lane. In other words, it was only possible because Paris is a big city and Hidalgo's administration simply hasn't finished fixing its streets—that's the opposite of the premise of Richard Fausset's story.
Getting back to the Bay Area, I called out this kind of windshield-bias-through-factual-omission two years ago in a San Francisco Chronicle story that "showed both sides," quoting merchants in Berkeley saying bike lanes reduce sales. Again, it's fine to quote merchants and advocates who disagree, but reporter Rachel Swan failed to contextualize the quotes by including any of the extensive research on this question. There are reams of real-world data that show bike lanes do not reduce sales and, in many cases, they increase sales.
Vision Zero has already been achieved in many European cities and even a few smaller American cities, including Hoboken New Jersey, which hasn't had a traffic death in seven years. Continuing to frame stories as if these facts are somehow an open question is a form of disinformation. And for the record, pedestrians in successful Vision Zero cities text, drink, and sometimes don't pay attention. Harrison-Caldwell, to his credit, at least pointed out that San Francisco's data shows that most pedestrian fatalities are the fault of drivers. That said, amplifying voices that blame pedestrians for their own deaths seems grotesquely insensitive to the families of people who've been run down.
It is physically possible to achieve Vision Zero in San Francisco, just as it is in any city with the political commitment to do so. Spreading disinformation and disseminating victim-blaming nonsense without including the underlying facts, however, makes that commitment harder to achieve. The Standard generally does good work, but in this realm, it clearly needs to do better.
