Establishing Vision Zero in New York City: The Story of a Pioneer

Abstract

AbstractVision Zero was established in 2014 as the foundation of the New York City road safety policy. The purpose of this chapter is to understand why and how Vision Zero was introduced as well as by whom and with what tools. The chapter focuses on understanding this policy change in New York City and is based on a document study and 18 semi-structured interview with 19 respondents city administration staff, researchers, media, and NGOs. The analysis is made by looking closer at the state of four aspects by the time of the establishment of Vision Zero – problem framing, policy formulation, political actors, and proposed solutions. This theoretical framework is mainly based on the work of John Kingdon (Agenda, Alternatives, and Public Policies. Little, Brown, Boston, 1984) and Michael Howlett (Public Policy Adm 34(4):405–430, 2019). The chapter states that there were several factors leading to the adoption of Vision Zero. First, the road safety problems were not as serious as in many other regions of the USA, but compared to other major cities in the western world, the fatalities and serious injuries in New York City were deemed unacceptable by politicians, NGOs, and the public. The imminent problem on the ground was further emphasized by several high-profile cases of child fatalities in traffic crashes. Second, the Vision Zero policy or philosophy was a coherent and above all a successfully tested policy based on a scientific foundation. The credit for introducing Vision Zero in the New York City context is given to non-governmental organizations such as Transportation Alternatives and Families for Safe Streets and specific public administrators in key positions. These actors were all searching for new solutions, and as the politicians placed road safety high on the agenda, a window of opportunity was opened to Vision Zero. In addition, politicians, with the support and pressure from NGOs, established a policy program based on Vision Zero, and this program further established a belief in Vision Zero as a credible way forward. There was and is criticism directed towards the policy based on equity and that Vision Zero risks strengthening discriminatory structures. The basic idea of adapting the physical infrastructure to accommodate human mistakes is challenging in many American contexts, but in a diverse city such as New York, this approach may be able to address equity, according to several respondents, if based on solid crash data. The Vision Zero in New York City differs from the original Swedish version in mainly two ways: the focus in New York on law enforcement and on the behavior of the individual road user.