JOHN CICHOWSKI

Road Warrior: Can New Jersey match New York City's Vision Zero in curbing road deaths?

More than 30 advocates want NJDOT to join NYC in adopting Swedish system desaigjed

John Cichowski
NorthJersey

If— like Pam Fischer and Pat Ott— you keep track of governmental goals, you might not like the results of a goal set in 2015 to reduce road deaths in New Jersey by 2.5 percent each year under a strategy called Vision Zero.

The Swedish Parliament adopted the first Vision Zero fatality-reduction strategy in 1997. Swedish road deaths have fallen more than 50 percent since then.

At that pace, fatalities should have fallen to 534 in 2017 as part of a 15-year plan designed to reach zero deaths. But instead, New Jersey missed the mark by a wide margin as fatalities rose each year, hitting 625 last year, according to preliminary State Police figures.

By contrast, New York City's well-organized Vision Zero strategy is credited with pushing total fatalities down to 214 last year, the fourth consecutive yearly decline in road deaths.

“New Jersey has adopted a Vision Zero goal, but there’s no real strategy — not much followup,” explained Fischer, former director of the state's Highway Traffic Safety Division, who spoke at a brainstorming session in Hamilton that attracted some 30 other traffic-safety advocates early this month.

Former NJDOT Safety Division Director Pat Ott was impressed by driver and pedestrian courtesy on a recent visit to Sweden. "They obey the law!" she exclaimed.

"We're going in the wrong direction," added Ott, who once headed the state Department of Transportation's Traffic Safety Division,

Armed with the support of these first responders, health providers, crash victims, AAA club executives and others, the pair brought their concerns last week to Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti, Gov. Phil Murphy’s new acting transportation commissioner. 

"Diane was very supportive," said Fischer. "Instead of just stating the state's Vision Zero intention, she agrees New Jersey should activate a plan that involves stakeholders  both in and out of government."

DOT spokesman Steve Schapiro agreed, noting that success takes "a collaborative effort among everyone — drivers, riders, cyclists, and pedestrians."

Fischer and Ott

Although they no longer hold state-government jobs, Fischer and Ott carry weight in transportation circles. Now consultants for other states and traffic-safety groups, they were leading New Jersey's traffic-safety initiatives when Gutierrez-Scaccetti headed the New Jersey Turnpike Authority—  a time when road deaths were dropping like a stone throughout the state.

From 2007 to 2010, fatalities fell at an unprecedented pace — from 724 to 556, partly because of vehicle-safety improvements and partly because of policies encouraged by Fischer and Ott.

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Exactly what an aggressive, modern Vision Zero plan might mean for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists isn't clear, however. In New Jersey, only one municipality, Jersey City, has recently embarked on an action plan,

But core principles remain consistent from program to program throughout the 40 other states with municipalities and regional groups that have embraced Vision Zero: Community involvement, Road-design reforms. Enforcement technology, And lots of planning. 

Under New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio's initiative, community leaders were directed to include the people who actually use the roads to help plan reforms, a factor sometimes missing in New Jersey's crash-prevention campaigns, which rely heavily on periodic law-enforcement involving overtime pay for cops.

The safety gains made across the Hudson have been impressive.

Deaths fell 28 percent over a four-year period. Pedestrian fatalities dropped 45 percent to 101.

Many of the declines are attributed to limiting speed on city streets to 25 mph. Traffic cameras also helped increase speeding tickets by nearly 60 percent in 2015 alone.

A Swedish innovation

Vision Zero began in Sweden in 1996 under an act of Parliament. Leaders there describe it in a single sentence that followers have embraced since then: "No loss of life is acceptable."

After vacationing in Stockholm last year, Ott came home impressed. 

“They’re courteous, they obey the law there, and I felt safe,” she said.

Although the Swedes haven't reached zero yet, they've managed to reduce fatalities by more than 40 percent from 2006 to 2016 by investing in these steps.

  • Reducing speed limits on urban roads.
  • Separating pedestrians and bicycles from cars by installing zones and barriers to protect them from oncoming vehicles.
  • Installing more than 13,000 well-marked pedestrian crossings, including spans over bridges and zebra stripes flanked by flashing lights — factors credited with cutting walking deaths in half.
  • Refusing to tolerate drunken driving — that could explain why only one-quarter of 1 percent of drivers operate vehicles with blood-alcohol counts above the legal limit.

But can the culture embraced in a sparsely populated country of 9 million be transferred to a densely populated state of 9 million that too often tends to value convenience over safety?

“If we can accept a zero standard for our families, why not accept it for our extended family?” said Fischer.

Eradication, not reduction

For some activists, this approach represents a step closer to treating road deaths as a serious public-health menace instead of relying on civil-engineering principles that tend to chip away at serious dangers in an effort to reduce risk to acceptable levels.

"Like those in public health who work to eradicate disease, we're saying there isn't an acceptable level of risk," explained Leigh Ann Von Hagen, senior researcher for the Voorhees Transportation Center who participated in the brainstorming session. "We want to eliminate fatalities. We don't want to say some people are going to have to die because that's the way it works."

For Fischer, Vision Zero represents a proven strategy that can make New Jersey a traffic-safety leader again.

Former New Jersey Highway Traffic Safety Director Pam Fischer and 30 other road-safety activists are asking NJDOT to improve the state's lagging Vision Zero commitment.

“Although New Jersey does its share of enforcement, a strong Vision Zero program requires much more," she said. "You have to evaluate what works and what doesn’t work. You have to take human error into account and engage the community in what you’re doing. And you need leaders who will promote safety initiatives by making them priorities."

But in the recent past, Garden State motorists haven’t exactly welcomed innovative driving-safety initiatives, such as red-light cameras, license plate stickers that identify inexperienced teen drivers, or stopping for — not simply yielding to — pedestrians in marked crosswalks.

Still, despite bitter controversy, New Jersey has already shown other states that lives can be saved by curbing dangerous, yet ingrained, driving conduct — at least in the young.

Restrictions pay dividends

Unlike most other jurisdictions, fatalities among novice drivers under the age of 21 have been plummeting since 2010 when reforms in New Jersey's graduated driver-license law imposed an 11 p.m.-to- 5 a.m. curfew, passenger limits, a red-tag driver identifier and other restrictions during their first year behind the wheel.

The result: A steady decline in teen-driving fatalities. Last year, just 18 novice-driver deaths were reported compared to 36 in 2007. And so far this year, the number of young drivers who died behind the wheel stands at one.

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Success apparently takes more than laws.

These reforms required the consistent, day-to-day support of teachers, police, parents and others— and it still falls short of an acceptable Vision Zero number. But it's close enough to show that it might be possible to improve a driving culture that killed nearly 40,000 people on American roads last year.

Email: Cichowski@northjersey.com