Vision Zero failed in Los Angeles because the city failed to adequately fund it. And the first time there was significant pushback, city officials ran scared, cancelling fully funded and shovel ready projects in multiple council districts, including dangerous and deadly streets like North Figueroa and Temple Street.
Now there’s a campaign urging Mayor Bass and the City Council to declare a state of emergency regarding traffic violence — although that may fall to her successor, whoever that may be, after June’s election.
You’ll find my name on the petition calling for it.
I’m not sure how it got implemented in LA or Hoboken but vision zero in pdx is so poorly thought out. I think we have ~50 traffic fatalities a year. I think ~35 are homeless related and they don’t give a fuck about anything when they cross the road. Traffic calming measures aren’t fixing that. More resources to help the unhoused might. The next ~10 are cause by poor lighting and street racing which can be fixed but aren’t addressed well if at all in our plan. The last 0-5 are ones that would legitimately be solved by some traffic calming. We’ve spent all our money trying to implement traffic calming when that would only fix 10% of the fatalities and nothing on addressing the root causes of 90% of the fatalities. So since implementing vision zero deaths have gone up and traffic has gotten worse.
Edit. I guess I haven’t looked at the data in a few years and it has gotten better since 2023. The first few years of the plan fatalities were going up each year. Unhoused deaths in particular have gotten much better going from accounting for 74% of the fatalities down to 20%.