DC Vision Zero wasn’t working but all seemed silent. The Vision Zero campaign originated in Sweden and was first introduced with a zero-by-2020 tagline back in the '90s. Mayor Muriel Bowser, at a time when District Homicides were soaring in 2015, adorned herself in helmet and suit of armor, unsheathed her sword, and made a bold declaration at the knights’ table: “There Will Be No More Traffic Deaths in the District of Columbia by 2024!” The knaves of the mainstream media were agasp. They reported all over the land that the Warlord of Their Raven Marxist Agenda had chosen quite wisely. While under her regime Bowser has witnessed over 1,600 homicides, this achievement shall be her greatest, there shall be no deaths in the land for another day. For if the other great knights of the European Progressive Roundtable had smitten traffic windmills in Sweden, imagine how much more Bowser could conquer in DC!
As of Friday, November 17, 2023, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’ s Metropolitan Police Department reports that traffic fatalities are up 69% over last year at this time: 44 (2023) versus 26 (2022). What many DC media darlings will not report concurrently is that traffic fatalities have risen 69% since she implemented Vision Zero in 2015: 44 (Year to Date, 2023) versus 26 (2015). The Exceptional Conservative Show Host Kenneth McClenton estimates the Traffic Fatalities will end the year at 48. That number would be 37% higher than the end of the last year (2022) and 54% higher than when the City (Mayor and City Council) implemented Vision Zero in 2015. It is indeed much further away from the goal of “eliminating traffic fatalities and severe injuries“ per the Vision Zero Network. You do not have to be an Elizabeth Seton High School mathematician to know this truth.
The Vision Zero program seems more an arrogant trophy of Utopians’ achievement or intent to make DC more European than an effective public policy of traffic safety. Unlike its promises, it has not been safe, healthy, equitable or produced mobility. The concept of Vision Zero was first adopted by Sweden in 1997 as a long-term objective that no one should be killed or seriously injured in traffic, and that the transportation system should develop and implement policies and practices necessary for zero traffic fatalities. Its success in America, since 1997, has motivated only 45 or little more cities to implement it or even consider its implementation. Despite it being implemented in 2/10ths of 1 percent of America’s 19,495 cities in over a decade, the global elite are determined to make certain that the conclusion arrived it is that only fifteen (15) minute cities will be the answer to keeping cities safe from violent vehicles that result in the fatalities of bicyclists and pedestrians. Its pursuit is more of the themes of arrogance and deceit than effectiveness and truth.
The time to bring an end to this frail Leftist attempt to remove cars from the inner-city and create 15 minute cities was many years ago as the City of Washington witnessed not a growth in public safety but in traffic fatalities. Traffic fatalities had fallen from a height of fifty-four (54) in 2007 to nineteen (19) in 2012. A slight uptick in following years--twenty-six (26)--gave opportunists the chance to declare a crisis. Rahm Emanuel, former Mayor of Chicago, current United States ambassador to Japan, and, White House Chief of Staff under former President Barack Hussein Obama II when he said this, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” The crisis answer was a rigid pursuit of traffic management and the proposition of a new way of travel in the United States--Vision Zero.
Vision Zero Part I:DDOT Made Progress on Engineering & Equity but Gaps Remain, Auditor Kathleen Patterson, announced that DC’s Vision Zero was failing but not because it doesn’t work but because Bowser and the DC City Council failed in implementation, “ While District leaders made a public commitment to Vision Zero, implementation was delayed by failure to establish the bureaucratic infrastructure within DDOT and failure to fully fund the Vision Zero Omnibus Amendment Act”. DC’s answer to failure is more failure.
It May Be Time to Audit the Audit.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released, on September 28, 2023, its early estimates of traffic fatalities for the first half of 2023, estimating that traffic fatalities declined for the fifth straight quarter. An estimated 19,515 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes, representing a decrease of about 3.3% as compared to 20,190 fatalities in the first half of 2022. Fatalities declined in both the first and second quarters of 2023. Let me repeat, traffic fatalities are up 69% in the District of Columbia while the Nation’s traffic fatalities have fallen.
Our District leaders are propagandizing an argument that we need to double down on failure. The mainstream media does not want your eyes to believe what they are seeing. Or at least your brain!
District Department of Transportation (DDOT) Interim Director Sharon Kershbaum says get ready for the next tier of Chinese Communist Party surveillance. The City is preparing for the next stage of behavioral modification via traffic enforcement. Drivers caught blocking the bus stops will receive a citation in the mail with photos taken by cameras installed on Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) buses. The citation includes a picture of the plate and a zoomed-out image of the vehicle showing where it is on the bus. DDOT said these images are reviewed by multiple people to make sure there is a violation before citations are sent out. This clear lane enforcement will happen in two phases: Right now citations are given to those blocking the bus stops, and those blocking the bus lanes will receive a warning for now with tickets starting January 1, 2024.
What’s wrong with you, Ken! You don’t want buses being blocked and people not getting to where they are supposed to be. That blockade distorts commercialism and the free market system. We must do this for the good of capitalism!
Sure, Sure.
While Mayor Bowser is having streets in the M Street Navy Yard neighborhoods painted red, especially in areas where there is no bus stop, to ensure her camera-ticket revenue, can we explore the fields of physics and photography. Using the two disciplines of kinematics and dynamics, it is impossible to believe that an object traveling in a lane that is blocked in transit by more than one vehicle will be only able to photograph any more than the last object blocking its pathway. Dynamics, focused on the Laws of Motion, determines the causes of motion. Kinematics involves describing motion through properties such as position, time, velocity, and acceleration. A photographer can photograph two objects in a straight line, one visible and the other blocked. You will be able to see only the visible object fully and the blocked image, partially or not all. Under the Laws of Motion, the bus driven with camera on-board travels in a straight line in one lane.
If five cars are parked in a bus lane, as on H Street on any given day, the only car photographed will be the last of the five motionless cars. The bus driver, as he is paid by Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and must operate the vehicle on its behalf, will move in the straight line into the next lane before returning to the former lane to release its passengers. The bus driver, acting as tax revenue agent, has collected $100 out of a possible $500. As a tax collector, the driver is unjust. As a traffic enforcement, the bus is ineffective in removing its blockade. In fact, it is only impactful on the one violator. Many of the future violations will be against commercial carriers that have no other options of delivery. Those costs, mere tax revenue placed in general liability, will be passed onto consumers during the President Joseph Biden Build Back Better Economy. You, the consumer, will be paying for an inefficient, ineffective, punitive process on installing Vision Zero for the City of Washington.
Dan Luscher, author of “The “keystone habit” for reimagining our transportation system” on the :15 City Blog, said, “Oslo and Helsinki have taken top-to-bottom approaches to making streets safe, including low speed limits, street designs that prioritize safety over moving traffic, significant car-free spaces, comprehensive bike networks, and robust public transportation.” What many on the Left don’t tell you is how drastic an effort was taken to achieve this goal. The Guardian Newspaper reported,
“Christoffer Solstad Steen from Trygg Trafikk, a road safety organisation in Norway, said: “[Politicians in Oslo] have chosen to make it more difficult to use a car – it takes more time to drive from one part of the city to another now and you have to pay money to use the road much more than you used to.”
In 2017 there was a 70% increase in tolls across the city, in plans spearheaded by the Labour and Green parties, which led to a 6% decrease in traffic.
Car parking charges were also increased – by 50% in downtown Oslo and 20% elsewhere – although thousands of spaces have now been wiped out to make room for 35 miles of new cycle lanes.
The city has reduced speed to a maximum of 30km/h (18 mile per hour [mph]) outside schools and started trialling “heart zones”, where driving is banned in areas around schools. Officials in Oslo hope to create 100 of these zones over the next four years.”
The DC Department of Transportation has been quite deceptive in its process of instituting Vision Zero in the District of Columbia. They have not been forthright in the depths and lengths the City must go to create a Vision Zero Universe. Kea Wilson, author of Vision Zero is Missing Something Big: Getting Cars Off the Road, made it
abundantly clear, in a fashion that the bureaucrat can not speak and the Marxist’s constituencies can not accept. She proclaims the truth behind vision Zero, “It’s not hard to guess why advocates are shy to get on the #BanCars bandwagon.” The truth is the only way to create a city with zero traffic deaths is to eliminate the greatest source of the traffic fatalities--cars and trucks.
Victoria Transport Policy Institute Director Todd Litman pointed out the omission in a recent article for Planetizen. “Although the United States has rigorous road and vehicle-safety standards, and numerous traffic-safety programs, it also has the highest per capita traffic death rate among developed countries. Why? Because people in the United States also drive more than residents in peer countries.”
Muriel Bowser wants to be able to say in December 2023 is that Vision Zero didn’t work because of YOU. We tried slowing you down by lowering speed limits. We tried changing your behavior by speed cameras, stop sign cameras and other artificial intelligence items. We weren’t taxing you by acknowledging that Maryland and Virginia drivers weren’t subject to the same punitive efforts as District taxpayers--a dubious form of separate and not equal. If only you could have used our advanced and improving public transportation system. If only you could have fully used our bicycle lanes then, we would not have has as many traffic fatalities as our critics point out that we did before we started. Vision Zero isn’t the failure, the people of the City of Washington are the failure. We have begun to implement and fund our newest traffic safety program: Vision Negative Ten. By 2030, we will have no cars, no trucks! There will be no emissions, no EV or ICE! Carbon won’t grow on trees. Every American will get around Washington with a bus or subway pass. Free At Last, Free At Last, Thank Humankind, We Are Free At Last!
Long impugned by their Marxist government overseers from crime to COVID then, you will see District funded non profit organizations leading the Anti-Car Revival. Local media will trip over themselves to cover 24/7 as guilted District residents attend events sponsored by Disney, Coca-Cola, American Express, Bank of America, Lowe's, Pfizer and the Washington Commanders to turn over their cars and keys to the City of Washington. Donors will get a free bus pass to attend an event at the newly remodeled football stadium named for Marion Barry.
O, what a glorious day it will be for the City.
While the Progressive Left have begun to recite, “There’s No Place Like Home, There’s No Place Like Home” and “From the River to the Sea, We Will Get Rid of Carbon in Trees”, let me speak to those that have both feet on the ground. It’s time to reveal the truth about Vision Zero in its hometown--Sweden.
The Radical Left Argue for Vision Zero the way that the Military Complex argues for a greater share of the federal budget. Farhad Manjoo, New York Times Opinion Columnist, wrote:
“I don’t doubt the political wisdom of Manchin’s pledge to support only what he can explain. I do wonder, though, how he applies his maxim to a far more mammoth, more sweeping piece of the federal budget: the nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars that we are spending this year on a military that has become the epitome of governmental dysfunction, self-dealing and overspending.
Of course, I’m only kidding. I don’t actually wonder about Manchin’s stance on showering the Department of Defense with more money than it asks for, even more than it seems to know what to do with. Right around the time he was bayoneting Build Back Better, Manchin joined 87 other senators — Democrats and Republicans — in rubber-stamping another gargantuan budget for the Pentagon. They allocated $768 billion for the military in 2022, roughly $24 billion more than the White House requested from Congress.
Given all the challenges we face at home, does it make any sense to keep spending so many hundreds of billions on the Pentagon?”
The Radical Left and their rhetoric carriers can not let go of the Camelot Ideas of Utopia. Vision Zero isn’t failing, Long Live, Sweden! We just must do more, spend more and convince more!
In Springer Link, Matts-Åke Belin authored Vision Zero in Sweden: Streaming Through Problems, Politics, and Policies. He wrote, “Despite the strong political support for Vision Zero and its strategies, soon after its adoption dark clouds began to appear in the sky. To go from words to action, e.g., measures for the implementation of Vision Zero, turned out to be more difficult than its proponents had originally expected.” Yes, even the Swedes could not swallow the horse size pills of the Marxist’s anti-vehicle proposals. Why the increase in traffic fatalities? Sweden answers, “In line with what was predicted by road safety experts, when Sweden started to recover from its economic recession and get back to a normal economic growth, the number of fatalities flattened out and started to increase.” Are you trying to say that traffic fatalities are a part of life and death, why it appears to be the case. Traffic fatalities seem to happen at 20 miles per hour just as they do at 65 miles per hour. Just as the Left blames the gun during a murder, they are wantoned to blame the car in vehicular homicide. Never the shooter. Never the driver. Imagine if we would only lock up guns and vehicles, what a wonderful world this would be.
While the tyrannical approach towards traffic safety limps on with a downsized, less mandated version of its original Vision Zero in Sweden, the author wants you to know something, Vision Zero “did not solve the problem”. Like any other government program, it may shrink but it will never die. The Swedish government has offloaded the program to provide a softened approach to traffic safety.
How did Sweden handle Vision Zero failure? Belin writes. “The target for 2007 to halve the number of fatalities from 1998 was missed by more than 200 fatalities, compared to what the target stipulated. In 2006, the Social Democrat Party was voted out of office.” Social Democratic is the name of socialist parties in several countries. Democratic socialism has been described as representing the left-wing or socialist tradition of the New Deal. We call it the Democrat Party in the United States. Socialism has a way of always running out of Utopian ideas shortly before they run out of other peoples’ money. Sweden understood how you deal with Utopian ideas that lead to poor results and financially broken systems: VOTE THEM OUT!
DC, it may be time to Audit the Audit.
