“Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within society.”
— Founding principle of Sweden’s 1997 Vision Zero transport plan
Without explicitly blaming, a relatively new approach to transportation management being advanced in Northwest Arkansas essentially points to historic road and highway design priorities and declares them not good enough.
Since the advent of the mass-produced automobile, communities have mostly designed their streets and highways with one simple goal: to get motorists from point A to point B as quickly as possible, with reasonable accommodations for to security that made financial sense. In other words, the security measures had to overcome the cost-benefit analysis that, in some cases, leads to accepting a certain level of risk to save money.
The “old way” effectively assumed that there is no practical way to drive automobiles without also having a certain number of traffic accidents, some of them fatal or resulting in serious injury.
The Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission, a 57-year-old organization based in Springdale, is the hub of transportation policy and planning for future federally funded projects. In late June, this commission adopted a comprehensive transportation safety plan called Vision Zero, developed by a consulting firm called Toole Design Group.
Perhaps to further clarify the kind of change this plan represents for the future of Northwest Arkansas, Toole Design Group describes the focus of its work this way: “From day one, Jennifer Toole was committed to that the company would not generate revenue from projects that conflict with our Core Values. We have adhered to this promise: Tool Design is not in the business of moving more cars faster.”
Vision Zero is a transport design and planning concept born in Sweden in the late 1990s. In essence, the approach declares it unacceptable that some people are necessarily killed or seriously injured simply because they choose to travel on a community’s streets, sidewalks, roads, and trails.
The Fayetteville City Council last week adopted the Vision Zero goal. Matt Milhalevich, the city’s active transportation manager, described implementing Vision Zero through a Safe Streets for All program as “building and reinforcing multiple layers of protection both to prevent accidents in the first place and to minimize the damage caused to the people involved when accidents occur”. It is a holistic and comprehensive approach that provides a guiding framework for making places safer for people. It’s a shift from a conventional security approach because it focuses on both human error and human vulnerability and designs a system with lots of redundancies to protect everyone.”
Bentonville and Rogers have also made their support for Vision Zero official.
Other Northwest Arkansas communities will be asked to embrace the concept, which, if implemented in both reality and paper, changes quite fundamentally how transportation will work in the region’s future.
Zero deaths and zero serious injuries.
It’s a good goal.
It’s an aspirational goal.
But is it realistic?
Is that the point?
It really doesn’t seem like it. Rather than suggesting that some kind of transport nirvana can be achieved, Vision Zero should be seen as fully combining the desire to prevent death and serious injury with the way transport infrastructure is designed and operated. The result may not be, in fact, we’re sure it won’t be perfection. But what is designed and built should not start with the assumption that death and serious injury are just a part of modern transportation.
What does this mean for our cities and the region? It appears to be more than motorists and others have witnessed in recent years, although it wasn’t known as Vision Zero.
Roundabouts, for example, are key, in large part because they avoid putting vehicles on collision courses — that is, intersections — with each other. As anyone who drives in Northwest Arkansas knows, motorists can be impatient. Even when traffic signals turn red, sometimes one, two, or even three drivers push their luck, and everyone else’s, by continuing into the intersection. Traditional intersections depend on everyone obeying the signals. When they don’t, the physics of the resulting collisions create a lot of force, which human bodies don’t respond well to. Roundabouts, however, keep traffic moving, reducing impatience, and even if a crash occurs, vehicles move in the same direction, reducing the severity of the impact.
Speed reduction is also a key factor. When a vehicle and a bicycle or pedestrian are involved in a collision, the difference between 30 mph and 20 mph is huge. Injuries are less serious.
Vision Zero assumes, correctly, that motorized vehicles are not the only concern. Pedestrians and cyclists are equally concerned. That’s even more so as Northwest Arkansas’ status as a region that embraces cycling grows.
Other strategies could include narrowing lanes, which tends to deter speeding, as well as the use of raised crosswalks and speed bumps. But in places where cars need to travel faster, Vision Zero is pushing to completely separate cyclists and pedestrians from roads designed for cars and trucks.
In some communities in other states, automated enforcement, known as speed cameras, is used to catch people speeding or running red lights. These programs, which mail traffic citations to car owners, are not legal in Arkansas. But state lawmakers this year made it legal for police to use speed cameras in work zones, with law enforcement handled by an officer stationed outside the work zone. Automated enforcement has produced significant reductions in speeding in other states, but the question remains whether this would ever be allowed as part of Vision Zero plans in Arkansas.
As communities embrace the Vision Zero approach, only time will tell if they mean it. If they do, it will significantly change the way transport planning and design works in this region. Sometimes, though, the public can be loud and clear about their distaste for what they see as barriers to car travel in favor of cyclists and pedestrians. Will these traditional views collide with the new perspective? Will some of these changes become a political hot potato? If residents feel a city is overreaching in managing them as drivers, will they just accept it or rebel?
Regional ideas don’t always work. We’ve heard occasional suggestions for a regional jail for years, but local officials don’t seem to want any of it. Even with the usual collaboration among Northwest Arkansas communities, local leaders don’t always agree, or they agree on paper and behave differently in reality. And all of this is sure to be a bit more complicated and sometimes more expensive. Will local leaders get on board?
If Vision Zero is adopted, Northwest Arkansas’ transportation system will look very different in the coming decades. It might take a little longer to get from point A to point B. But fewer deaths and serious injuries? This is a pretty strong reason to accept the view.
