What is going on with Vision Zero

In 2019, the Dallas County Council gave the green light to incorporate Vision Zero strategies into all future traffic planning in an effort to curb vehicle fatalities while increasing safe and healthy mobility for all. When a local TV station conducted a progress report in late 2023, however, investigators found that traffic crashes had killed more than 1,000 people and severely injured 5,500 over the past five years.

Los Angeles made a similar commitment to Vision Zero in 2015, but with 2025—the year in which L.A. originally intended to reach zero traffic fatalities—now just a year away, the problem is getting worse. In 2023 alone, 337 people were killed by cars in L.A., an 8 percent increase over the previous year. Over the past eight years, traffic fatalities in the city have nearly doubled.

Even in New York where Vision Zero policies have led to a 16 percent reduction in traffic fatalities over the past 10 years, a relative success by any measure, 259 traffic fatalities (including the deaths of 29 cyclists) occurred over the past year.

Why have Vision Zero strategies failed to produce the kinds of results in the U.S. that the movement has been so successful in attaining throughout Europe? There, countries like Sweden, Spain, and The Netherlands have experienced a reduction in traffic fatalities of 50 percent or more through the implementation of Vision Zero policies.

In marked contrast, the U.S. continues to bring up the rear among the top 29 high-income countries, according to a report by the Center for Disease Control. More than 42,000 people currently meet their deaths annually on U.S. streets, while 2021 saw traffic fatalities rise to their highest level in 16 years.

Such statistics clearly demonstrate that merely making a commitment to Vision Zero will do little to move the needle in reducing traffic fatalities. Even making modest changes—reducing speed limits, adding bike lanes or imposing road diets—while commendable, does little to impact the carnage caused by excessive speed and unsafe driving habits.

And let’s face it: while hardly anyone objects when a mayor or county executive commits to a Vision Zero policy, the reality of implementing that policy typically evokes strident objections from individuals and community groups who see the changes Vision Zero would bring about as an assault on their way of life, slowing down their commute times.

Cries of NIMBY (not in my back yard) are nothing new, but Vision Zero also seems to be facing opposition from many traffic engineers and elected officials. For their part, traffic engineers typically object to Vision Zero because it flies in the face of what they are trained to do: namely, move traffic from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible. Relying on the 85th percentile rule, a traffic engineering standard that sets the speed limit on public roadways at the speed at or below which 85 percent of the vehicles travel on a specific road segment, traffic engineers traditionally have recommended policies which focus on maximizing speed and minimizing delay.

Elected officials, on the other hand, have tended to advocate for Vision Zero in theory (after all, who is against safer streets), but have often backed down in the face of community opposition and claims that speed and redlight cameras are little more than a money grab.

Given this pushback, it would appear the conversation around Vision Zero must be changed if it is ever to take hold in this country. Rather than focusing on moving vehicles as quickly as possible, engineering decisions and traffic policies need to recognize the realities of physics and the frailty of the human body. Data indicates that three-quarters of the individuals hit by a vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour will die. If that speed is cut in half, though, the fatality rate will drop to 10 percent. Bottom line, lower speeds mean fewer accidents and less severe injuries when an accident does occur.

Clearly, selling that concept to a society wedded to speed is never going to be easy. State and local officials must have the political will to make the case for policies that will lower speeds, require vehicle safety features, install curb extensions and crosswalks, and provide protected walking, biking, and transit options. They must support redesigning transportation systems that make the physical vulnerabilities of the human body a priority and encourage a safer culture for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.

But as the past decade has demonstrated, just expressing support for Vision Zero isn’t nearly enough to make it happen. Government officials and community leaders need to follow through by drafting a plan for implementing Vision Zero policies, setting a deadline for completion, creating a check list of everything that needs to be accomplished for each tactic to be realized, and then taking the necessary steps to implement the defined tactics.

Sounds simple, but again, nothing will happen without the political will to turn proposed changes into realities. Going in, elected and appointed officials must recognize that they are likely to face resistance from angry commuters who don’t understand why their drive to and from work, school, or other destinations now takes a little longer. They need to be ready to make the case that while speeds may be reduced and road widths reduced, such measures are drastically lowering the likelihood of accidents happening and fatalities or serious injuries occurring.

In short, they need to make a decision that favors physics, public safety and saving lives over speed and lack of congestion. And while we as a society may still have that need for speed, it’s time we all realized that the toll that speed and dangerous or distracted driving takes is not worth the loss of life, that empty seat at the dinner table, that such dangerous practices inevitably produce.