Reassessing Traffic Accidents in Los Angeles - A Digital Humanities Project
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Vision Zero in the U.S.
In order to solve the problem, cities all throughout the country are embracing Vision Zero. Vision Zero is a road safety framework based on the assumption that traffic deaths and serious injuries can be eliminated. The project was first established in Sweden in 1997 (Center for Active Design, n.d.). The country was on the verge of a traffic mortality rate of 7 per 100,000 inhabitants, and it was time to act. The objective was to address traffic safety from a systemic, design-based perspective. Vision Zero planners in Sweden understood that humans make mistakes and tried to construct safer roads to reduce the number of persons killed as a result of those mistakes. Sweden reduced traffic deaths mostly by using physical interventions such as speed bumps and roundabouts to reduce vehicle speeds (Goodyear, 2014). The Vision Zero program in Sweden was successful in making roadways safer. Despite the fact that there were many more cars on the road in the mid-2000s, the country's traffic mortality rate was less than half of what it had been when the program was launched in the late 1990s. It became a model for traffic safety outside of Sweden as a result of its success. By 2018, more than 30 cities throughout the country had pledged to achieve Vision Zero and had issued or begun creating plans (Vision Zero, n.d.).
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However, cities in the United States have not adopted Vision Zero in the same way that it was developed in Sweden. Instead, the Vision Zero concept has been integrated with more traditional American traffic safety approaches. For more than a century, traffic safety programs have been built on the "three Es": education (of road users), enforcement (of traffic laws), and engineering (of traffic laws) (of streets) (Porter, 2011). The three Es were at the heart of the earliest Vision Zero initiatives in America, but more recent attempts have expanded the list to include additional Es including equity, assessment, and encouragement (Aboelata, Yanez, & Kharrazi, 2017). These programs share the same declared goal to zero road deaths as Sweden's Vision Zero, but they have broader scopes that go beyond design interventions.
Vision Zero in LA
Los Angeles is one of the earliest cities in the U.S. that launched the Vison Zero project. It was introduced by Mayor Eric Garcetti when he was issued an executive directive in August 2015. The regulation established a target of a 20% reduction in traffic fatalities by 2017 and zero traffic fatalities by 2025. The decree also highlighted the city's short- and long-term strategies for achieving Vision Zero. It's a pledge to make the city a fantastic environment where people can move safely and securely regardless of method of transportation. It prioritizes human life in city street design and proposes ways for how government and citizens may collaborate to decrease traffic deaths to zero, with a special focus on the most vulnerable road users (City of Los Angeles, 2015).
To guide the program, the executive directive had mandated the formation of the Vision Zero Steering Committee and the Vision Zero Task Force. The Steering Committee includes representatives from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT), the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and the Bureau of Engineering (BOE), among others. The Task Force includes government agencies such as the Department of Aging and the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, who were not directly involved in Vision Zero but were nevertheless impacted by the strategy. The Los Angeles Task Force is almost exclusively made up of government entities, unlike Portland's Vision Zero Task Force, which is made up of a mix of government agencies and community groups. The Vision Zero Alliance, a network of advocacy groups interested in Vision Zero, represents community organizations on the Task Force. The Alliance, which was founded in the summer of 2015, advises the city on Vision Zero concerns but is administered autonomously by its member organizations. In January 2017, the City of Los Angeles released its Vision Zero Action Plan.
Limitations
However, the data visualization from the dataset in the previous slides has questioned the project's integrity. Based on the graph, the number of accidents has been increasing annually since 2015, when the project Vision Zero was initiated. Although the number has dropped significantly from 2019, it was most likely due to the pandemic.
According to an interview with John Yi, executive director of the Los Angeles Walks pedestrian advocacy organization, the Vision Zero project was underfunded with low priority (Smith, 2022). As a result, attending task force meetings and devoting other time to Vision Zero is a significant commitment, and activists are not compensated for their efforts. As a result, several organizers stated that they could not dedicate as much time as they would have wished to Vision Zero. (Abonour, 2018). TRUST South LA, for example, joined the city's Vision Zero Alliance early on in the process to press the group to focus on racial justice. It is a community land trust that offers a diverse range of services. However, due to a lack of capacity and a large number of initiatives, the organization decided to stop attending meetings for the time being (Yang, Chen, & Yuan, 2021).
Nonetheless, the lack of financial problems exists within the government as well (Abonour, 2018). City planners, like community organizations, have a finite amount of resources to devote to any given issue. As a result, while drafting the city's Vision Zero strategy, planners had to keep up with many other transportation initiatives. For example, one employee of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT), who participated in a study, expressed a wish to meet with the Vision Zero Alliance members more frequently. However, this was not possible due to competing professional obligations (Abonour, 2018).
On the other hand, the conflict between government officials and stakeholders might escalate if there is no defined framework for involvement (Johansson, 2009). Malcolm Harris, the Director of Programs and Organizing for TRUST South LA, had trouble interacting with the LAPD. According to Harris, a multi-pronged strategy is required in this project to improve communication.
Despite Vision Zero's ambitious goals, there is much work to be done to improve the efficiency of the project. Vision Zero will fail if government officials are unable to coordinate their efforts and activists are unsure who to contact inside the government to have their concerns heard. These concerns will continue to plague the process unless clear leadership is provided.