Rachel Weiner

Vision Zero, the concept is that there should be zero traffic deaths, but it's really sort of a mentality as much as a goal.

It's to treat traffic deaths as unacceptable and preventable the same way we treat airplane deaths, as opposed to something that just is going to happen sometimes and is, you know, sort of the price we pay for convenience of driving.

Because Vision Zero was a city-level movement in the U.S.

without strong buy-in in a lot of cases from state and federal government,

These cities were kind of constrained from above by state and federal law and then constrained from below by this localized opposition because doing anything to change roadways inspires a huge amount of backlash.

The local city councilman put through a plan to reduce Vista Del Mar from four lanes to two so that there was one lane in each direction.

He also moved more parking as part of that to the beach side as opposed to across the road from the beach, which is why people were running across this area.

four-lane, 40-mile-per-hour speed limit road.

There are tradeoffs between safety and convenience.

And even under Obama, even under Biden, I think advocates would say they had trouble getting the federal government to kind of like put their money where their mouth was and fund these safety projects effectively and accept that, you know, they might make some people unhappy.