AUDIO:

The following is a rough machine transcript. Click the words to skip to that point in the audio.

TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews report. I'm your host this week Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center and I am joined by my fellow Gang Green member, Colin Fiske, executive director of CRTP, the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. Colin would like to introduce today's guest for us.

COLIN FISKE:

Oh, absolutely. So with us today we have two local experts in transportation. We have Stevie Luther who works for the Humboldt County Association of Governments, HCGAOG. Stevie, welcome.

STEVIE LUTHER:

Thank you.

FISKE:

And we also have Alexis Kelso working for Caltrans District One. Welcome, Alexis, and I suppose actually perhaps y'all should give your titles.

LUTHER:

I am the associate regional planner ...

ALEXIS KELSO:

... and I am a senior transportation planner.

WHEELER:

So if if you weren't able to figure out based on kind of the guest list today, we're talking about transportation planning and in particular we're thinking about something called Vision Zero, which is a nationwide or even international movement to reduce pedestrian fatalities, road fatalities generally. And so we'll we'll get into that. But maybe you can set the scene how how is Humboldt County doing when it comes to pedestrian fatalities or serious injuries on our roads? Are are we are we okay?

FISKE:

Generally? No, I would say we're not okay there we have quite high rates of fatalities and serious injuries for people walking and biking as well as for people driving in the county some of the highest rates in the state actually. And it's I should say that it's always a little bit hard to know where we stand at any given moment because the official data are usually published a year or two behind, but just based on what we see in the news every day and what we have seen in years past, we're facing what I would call a safety crisis on the streets

WHEELER:

And so does someone want to take a stab at defining Vision Zero for us, and how Vision Zero attempts to address this problem. Thank you.

KELSO:

So, I mean, it's a pretty simple concept, right? It's that death and serious injury are just unacceptable and that our goal is really to have zero deaths or serious injuries on our roadways.

WHEELER:

Which is a refreshing way of thinking about this because I think for a long time we just accepted some level of carnage as a society that well, that's just the way that the road systems work, but it doesn't have to be the way that road systems work. There are other areas that have significantly fewer incidents than, than we do. So let's, let's learn from those systems.

FISKE:

Yeah, and I think, Tom, just just to emphasize as simple and sort of straightforward of an idea as Vision Zero, is it really is a pretty revolutionary change from the way historically and, and even in the present, most american transportation planning has viewed the issue, you know, we have established targets and many states and local jurisdictions still have targets which are not zero, just targets of a certain number of fatalities or serious injuries per million miles driven, Just assuming that, that the cost of doing business, so to speak is death and, and Vision Zero is, is really a challenge to that idea that and brings in the idea that that we can prevent people from dying and being seriously injured on the roads.

WHEELER:

So Colin you say that this is a pretty major transformation, the way that we think about pedestrian safety, road safety, do you know the history of this? How did we get to this point where we are deciding to change the paradigm?

FISKE:

Yeah, so, just very briefly, the Vision Zero movement was, I think most people consider it to have started in Sweden a few decades ago and I believe sort of spread in Northern europe after that, and only only really in the past five or 10 years has started being more widely adopted in the US. And I think Alexis and Stevie can probably speak to this more, but I think We're now at the point where there are a number of jurisdictions in the us probably, I don't know the exact number, but probably quite a few who have officially adopted Vision Zero as a policy target, but many of them have not seen the kind of progress that for example, some of those early adopters in Northern europe were able to see and we're starting to grapple with why that is, and how we can really back up this policy target with changes in the way that we design our streets and and run our cities.

WHEELER:

So let's get into how we can re rework our streets, the systems of transportation to get to that Vision Zero Stevie. Do you want, do you want to take a swing to talk about how H COg thinks about Vision Zero and how your your agency is is working to implement that?

LUTHER:

Yeah, absolutely. So just to backtrack a little bit, it was in 2015 that California committed to eliminating fatalities through the toward zero deaths campaign. And then it was recently in 2021 when Chicago adopted our regional transportation plan that we really committed to this Vision Zero and two to make it a policy goal to eliminate fatalities on our roadways and the way that we do that is by encouraging safe street design and to encourage people to go slower and there there doesn't need to coordination across the regions and the people that actually control the roads. H COg doesn't have jurisdiction over any roads, but we are this over our chain regional planning organization that can distribute regional funds and we try to support our cities and making those decisions.

WHEELER:

So, you talked about changing the infrastructure of the road, let's get into how infrastructure influences road safety because I I think that a lot of people don't realize how much is kind of baked into how much safety is influenced by by our our decisions on on road design. So Alexis, I I understand that that Caltrans has a new way of thinking about road infrastructure and road design. The safe systems approach, where well let's have you talk about safe systems

KELSO:

Sure, yeah, safe roads are definitely a part of the safe systems approach, but I think this pivot that Caltrans is making is really looking at like a much broader systems level approach to safety. So within the safe systems approach, there are six principles and then kind of five elements. So the five elements are you've already touched on roads, but then you also have safe road users, you have safe vehicles, safe speeds and then post crash care. So each of those things is like a layer of how the road functions. And then going back to the principles like principle number one is that deaths and serious injuries are unacceptable and that's really where our focus is now. Whereas previously we looked at all crashes, but now we're saying that the ones that were really addressing are those that are causing death or serious injury, which de emphasizes crashes where people are not injured and maybe it's just property damage. Only the second safe systems principle is that humans make mistakes. So just acknowledging that we aren't all perfect road users out there, perfect drivers, perfect pedestrians, perfect cyclists, mistakes do happen. And the third principle is that humans are vulnerable. So when mistakes happen, people who are outside of cars are more vulnerable. The fourth is that responsibility is shared. So all stakeholders of the transportation system have a role in safety. That's not just the users, but the planners like me and Stevie, the designers, the people who are enforcing traffic laws, people who are responding to crashes, we all have a role in this system. The fifth is that safety is proactive, so we should use the tools that are available to us to anticipate where crashes might occur and try to respond to those before a crash does occur. And then the last one is that redundancy is crucial. And we've talked about all these different principles and the different elements and they all provide a layer of safety where if one of them fails, Like for example, if you make a mistake, there's these other things in place so that hopefully that mistake does not result in a death or serious injury.

WHEELER:

So maybe we can, can use kind of a hypothetical example, Let's imagine that there is pedestrian strike on the 101 through Eureka. How might the safe systems approach think about this incident versus maybe what the, the historic Caltrans approach might have been. Let's say this is a mid block strike, somebody walks out into traffic, the car is traveling, doesn't see them, it results in serious injury. What what might be the result of this systems approach? How might that differ from from previous plane approaches?

KELSO:

So, you know, we're talking about 101 in Eureka, we're talking about a multi lane roadway which is a factor in crashes, were also talking about speeds, there's an opportunity to slow speeds down. We're talking about the response time within Eureka and emergency response time is pretty quick, but if you compare that to like more rural areas, being able to have emergency responders make it to a victim and then transport them and provide the care that they need plays a big role in how severe their injuries might be.

WHEELER:

So, so before, if you had, if you had an event like this, would would Caltrans have done a retrospective to try to figure out why this event occurred from, from my own perspective as an outsider who watches Caltrans who is interested in in transportation planning. It feels like in the past five years, Caltrans has really increased its commitment to safety and has started to think about road infrastructure in a different way where instead of just throwing up our hands and saying, well, there are people on the 101, right? Everybody knows that there are these people who just jump in front of traffic and there's nothing we can do about it. It seems like Caltrans is really trying to look at the roadway and think about the ways that the roadway is designed that might influence safety. We have long stretches of, of one oh one without safe crossings and so I know that the south broadway project that Caltrans is working on, we are increasing safe crossings and elsewhere Caltrans has made great investments to provide new infrastructure to better enable folks to cross the road. So maybe if this person who just jumped into traffic right, maybe if they were provided with that beacon crossing, maybe they would make a safer choice. So we can, we can influence people, we can kind of set up driver expectations that will have pedestrians the roadway by having more of this sort of stuff. I feel like this is, this is kind of a new way of thinking about this at the agency.

FISKE:

I think, I think you're getting at something really important. And part of that is I think one of the principles that Alexis mentioned, which is that we know that people make mistakes and people will make mistakes and and so, but that doesn't mean that the results of those mistakes will inevitably be death or serious injury. And so I think that historically there has often been a tendency to look at a crash and say look at a police report and maybe the police report says pedestrian violation was the result was the cause of this. And, and then maybe an engineer, a planner might have said, well the pedestrian acted stupidly, there's nothing we can do about that where the new approach is what could we have done to make sure that if this happened again, it did not result in such a serious injury or or or death. And I don't know if that seems like a good summary to you Alexis.

KELSO:

It absolutely does. And I wanted to circle back to one of the things that Tom said about jumping into traffic frequently, we can't ask the person who was hit what happened. So the narrative that they jumped out into traffic is the prevailing one, Not always the case, but also like you've been mentioning, the infrastructure is not there to set the driver expectation of where people should cross. The fact is that for bicyclists and pedestrians compared to drivers, spaces more permeable, right? Like you can cross the street at any point and maybe you're cutting across the parking lot because it's just a faster way to get there. So pedestrians and cyclists move a little bit in a way that is not as channel Ized as vehicles. I think the the safe systems approach recognizes that and we do need to provide the infrastructure to set the expectations of how people should be using the road, whether it's crossing or traveling down. But also looking at those other layers like speeds to where if someone is operating outside of what's expected that it doesn't result in death or serious injury.

WHEELER:

The news report, we are talking about Vision Zero, how we can get serious injuries and fatalities on our local road systems down to zero.

LUTHER:

Yeah, I want to add also that with speeding there is a substantial increase in the risk of death or serious injury. If you're going 20 mph, there's about an 8% chance if there's a crash that there will be a fatality or serious injury and it jumps up to 46% chance if you're going 40 mph so that's another area where we know that slowing the speeds will save lives and that the design of the roadway can be designed in a way that will encourage cars to drive slower

WHEELER:

Colin perhaps you can provide some examples of, of projects from your perspective as the director of a pedestrian advocacy group that are consistent with this vision of vision. 0 to my mind. I think of something maybe like the th and I street project in Eureka.

FISKE:

Yeah, I think that's a great example.

WHEELER:

Can you define that project for for folks who may not have been playing, paying attention to transportation, playing decisions.

FISKE:

Sure. So this is a project that will reduce the number of lanes on H and I streets in rica which are apparently three lane, one way streets, so take away one vehicle lane from each of those streets and add protected bicycle infrastructure, but also some sort of traffic calming and pedestrian safety infrastructure sort of bulging out the corners at intersections, which reduces the distance that people have to walk across and makes them more visible to drivers and there there are a bunch of other details to the design. But I think those are kind of the main features and and really I think that is a good example because it it includes three of the big strategies that we can use. Those are providing safe and protected infrastructure for people who are biking, providing safer ways for people to move along and across streets while they're walking or rolling in a wheelchair or or another mobility device and then slowing down traffic. So that as Stevie mentioned, you reduce the likelihood of death or serious injury when a collision occurs. And I think there are there are lots of other examples, but that's a good one because it it sort of is relatively comprehensive in that way.

WHEELER:

Can you, can you go over again how, how this this project might influence traffic speed? Because this is something I see often as a point of confusion where people believe that people will drive the speed that they want to drive regardless of what the road is like when we know that that the way that we designer road influences something like speed and we can't always have cop cars waiting to give people tickets for driving too fast to to some degree, we need to design our roads to achieve the speeds that we think are are reasonable and safe.

FISKE:

Yeah, Yeah. So there's quite a bit of research on this topic and what it shows is that the speeds that people drive are highly affected by the way that the street appears to them and and features of the design of the street. So one of those things is with and so the wider the street in general, the faster people will drive and that has to do with both the overall width of the street, but also the width of the lanes and what you call like the visual field of the street. So if you add a bike lane and you put up some vertical buffer between the bike lane in the street, it might be the same distance from building to building across the street, but it narrows that visual field for drivers and that reduces the speed that most people drive. Another thing, we talked about the bulb outs that reduce the crossing distance at intersections for people walking and rolling. Those also reduce speed because they reduce temporarily the width of the street and that has the effect of slowing down traffic. There are lots of other things people often think of speed bumps and speed tables, things that make you vertical deflections if you will. And those are also highly effective at slowing people down. There's a lot of other strategies you can cause the road to go back and forth a little bit instead of just the straight, that also causes people to drive slower. And so yeah, the design of the road has a huge impact on the speed that most people drive.

WHEELER:

It's amazing how we have these reptilian brains right? We we have this myth about ourselves that we are rational actors. But so much of of our decisions aren't aren't aren't conscious, they are subconscious. We we react to our environment I suppose actually rationally in this way. So let's let's get into why, why should people care? Why? And I mean, this sounds so so awful, but why why should we try to achieve this vision? zero death. And and maybe we can outline the environmental argument first because well this is an environmental podcast Colin do you want to to start there and then other people can jump in?

FISKE:

Sure. I mean, I think, I don't think it will be controversial in general to say that we should just try to save people's lives. But from the environmental standpoint, it's important for well, a number of reasons. But I would say maybe the most prominent is that transportation is the biggest contributor to the climate crisis, both locally and nationally, in the US we produce the most greenhouse gas emissions, the most climate pollution from vehicles out of any sexual and so in order to address that all of the research shows that yes, we have to go to zero emission vehicles. We have to electrify the fleet and so forth. But we also just have to drive less. We need to reduce the amount that we are moving vehicles around. If we want to reduce emissions fast enough to address the worst of the climate crisis and so you're not going to get people out of cars and walking and biking and taking the bus, which also usually involves walking or biking to get there if you have streets that are unsafe and that that actually threaten your life or that feel like they threaten your life, most people just won't get out there and do those things. So if you, if we want to reduce emissions in the system, you have to improve safety for active transportation,

WHEELER:

that makes sense. Anyone else have some other points on on this, the environmental

KELSO:

angle, but I think the point that the increasing safety can really help us achieve multiple goals. So there is the climate change kind of environmental goal is also equity. Transportation is also housing policy. So there's multiple things that we're facing as the state and a region that a safe systems approach can really help us advance those goals.

WHEELER:

So, you know, as, as a local observer of these things, a number of transportation safety projects recently have been controversial thinking of the H and I street project or in Eureka, there is also a proposed couple it on W and Dell beer again, to provide better safety for all road users. I think that this fits into some sort of a narrative that we have this war on cars or that that this is maybe a proxy for other fights for the transportation planners here. Do you have any thoughts on how we can reduce the friction in getting traffic safety projects approved and implemented when functionally if we reduce somebody speeding on H and I ST we're we're going to increase their commute length even if it is miniscule e people, people seem to bristle against this.

LUTHER:

Yeah, it is a challenge in the public sphere. And I just try to encourage people that we want to have options to be able to get places through a variety of modes. If somebody wants to ride their bike, they should have space on the street to do so safely. And this is just a quality of life issue to to be able to have a community that you can move around in safely and to have good air and get your exercise in in the morning. It's it's good public policy and there are definitely issues that do need to be worked through. There should be ample time for public comment and the public should be involved in the design of these projects early and often. Yeah, you know, it really does make a great community.

FISKE:

If I could pick up on that a little bit. I think there's a narrative in american culture that has been sort of hammered into our brains by car advertisements everywhere and movies and songs and everything that car is equal freedom. But I think part of what Stevie was getting at there is when we design communities and streets so that the only way you can get around as a car, it really traps people in cars and forces them to drive. As the only way to get around and providing safe and comfortable and convenient ways to move around using whatever mode of transportation you want is I think a closer definition of freedom in my view, I also wanted to just circle back around to Alexis to this earlier comments about equity because I think the uncomfortable fact is that one of the reasons that people often don't take street safety very seriously is that the traffic violence on our streets is disproportionately impacts people who are poor people of color and people who are otherwise sort of on the margins of society who don't have a loud political voice. And I think we don't like to think about that. But I really do think that that is one of the reasons we haven't had as much of a focus on that. And one of the reasons that people have been able to sort of get away with prioritizing saving five seconds on their commute over saving people's lives talking about

WHEELER:

this, I think is very useful and Colin I will give a compliment to see our teepee here. One of the things I think has been really important, the work that you've done is is working with news organizations to better report these sorts of incidents. So I think a couple of years ago you were to see on the Lost Coast Outpost -- where you can find this episode if you are listening in your car and want to revisit it again -- or in the Times-Standard or any of our local news outlets, you would see the story as a reflection of the driver's experience that this person jumped out in front, and that it took away causal language, pedestrian was hit instead of instead of attributing the strike to the vehicle or the driver. So, simple things like that. Reframing the narrative is going to be important in helping to protect all road users. Last thoughts before we wrap this up anybody.

FISKE:

Well, I just want to point out that it really is a big deal that has adopted Vision Zero policy, Caltrans has adopted it. Also, the city of Eureka and several other local jurisdictions have issued proclamations that that officially adopt Vision Zero. And so that's a, that's a big major step. And now I think comes the harder work of backing that up with the projects that we do and the plans that we develop and that's an ongoing process right now.

WHEELER:

And as I said before, I'm so thrilled that I've seen in such a short period of time, such a cultural change within transportation planning locally and I think it's a lot of the result of having good people like Stevie and Alexis. So thank you to both of our guests for your work to help make our road system safe and efficient. Hey, gang! Thanks so much. This has been another episode of the Econews Report, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the north coast of California.