Most people agree that public safety is a basic governmental concern. For city government, you might think in terms of police, fire and maybe public health. Madison's Director of Transportation Tom Lynch outlined a strong case for including transportation as well. He thinks Madison should adopt the Vision Zero goal of having no traffic fatalities or severe injuries, "while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all." 

Lynch shows for instance, that between 2013 and 2017 Madison experienced 44 traffic fatalities compared to 38 homicides. It had almost 3,100 non-incapacitating injuries due to traffic crashes compared to a little under 2,700 reported assaults. In 2018 alone, severe crashes involved 100 disabling injuries and 8 fatalities.  

The Vision Zero stance does not simply shrug off such abysmal crash figures as the inevitable price of a supposedly efficient transportation system. Rather, such figures are neither acceptable nor necessary. We could design our system for humans who inevitably make mistakes, mistakes that need not cost life nor limb.  Our transportation system should be oriented toward people, not the other way around.

If the city of Madison adopts a Vision Zero Action Plan, it will join over 50 cities nationwide and be the first city in Wisconsin to be a Vision Zero Community. And public transit can play an important role even if much of the talk is about traffic crashes involving motor vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians.

Madison has traditionally relied on its Traffic Engineering department’s "Neighborhood Traffic Management Program" (NTMP) to address the safety of our local roads. That program assigns points to such relevant road features as traffic volume, speed, crashes, the presence of schools or other high pedestrian generating areas, school walk routes and designated bicycle routes. It then adds up the points to rank a road's eligibility for"traffic calming," often the installation of a device such as a"speed hump," chicane, traffic circle or traffic island. 

There may be many strengths to the well-honed Neighborhood Traffic Management Program, but there are also major weaknesses. A general weakness (when unbalanced) is that it's methodology is reactive. According to the "traffic management" manual, there is no score for wanting to be proactive and avoid "an accident waiting to happen." The accident has to happen first so there can be "crash data." Insistence on an evidence-driven scheme is laudable in one respect but it also demonstrates a lack of imagination. Vision Zero's public health orientation is toward preventing injuries before they happen.

Traffic Engineering's traffic calming program furthermore focuses on local streets whereas all streets should be friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists. Fairly recently, City Planning found reason to revamp its 1960s zoning code that had artificially separated land use into areas totally focused on only one thing (such as low-density residential or commercial) into areas that can now house a mixture of uses, both in terms of density and in terms of activity (such as having a building with retail on the first floor and apartments on higher floors).

But Traffic Engineering still uses the street classification pattern complementary to the old "separate" zoning code. Instead of a more people-oriented grid pattern, Traffic Engineering's car-centric classification considers 1) low volume local (residential neighborhood) streets, 2) more medium-volume collectors designed to link local service streets to major city traffic streets, 3) medium-high volume standard arterial streets that serve larger geographical areas and/or more concentrated development, 4) somewhat higher-volume primary arterial streets "... designed to serve trip movements between different districts of the City and to allow access to abutting properties without disrupting traffic flow," and 5) very high-volume principal arterials "intended to serve heavy volumes of regional traffic and access-restricted facilities, such as the Beltline" (a freeway).

Should this classification system too be revamped to make mobility safe, healthy and equitable for all – less car-centric and more people-oriented? The Vision Zero approach suggests that street use and design should transcend the concern of engineers to involve a multi-disciplinary leadership approach involving the office of the Mayor, Police, Transportation, Public Health and maybe others such Planning, Emergency Services and Civil Rights.

In a preliminary move that garnered much media attention, Alder Grant Foster (District 15) introduced an amendment to the city's 2020 capital budget to help fund safety improvements at particularly dangerous locations identified by crash data involving automobiles, bicycles and/or pedestrians (a Vision Zero program is data-driven).

Reducing maximum travel speeds, improving signage and signals, adding buffers, modifying sidewalks and altering street medians were all strategies invoked at select places to increase safety. The idea was that most crashes occurred in only a limited number of places, and that modifications to those places could be particularly effective. Foster's amendment involved the allocation of $350,000 in addition to city budgeting for the more traditional "traffic calming" or "traffic management" program of the Traffic Engineering department.

How is Vision Zero related to bus use? Well, foremost perhaps is the fact that most bus riders are pedestrians too. Their safety getting to and from a bus stop is a major concern. The safer it is getting to/from the bus stop in the first place, the more inclined they are to ride the bus. And once on the bus, their travel is on average much safer than in a car. Everyone else is safer then too as bus riders are not driving, thus reducing the amount of traffic on the road. Third, the availability of good transit provides an alternative for people should let someone else do the driving, whether temporarily or permanently.

That bus riders are letting someone else drive garnered international attention a few months ago when German police confiscated the licenses of hundreds of e-scooter drivers who had celebrated liberally at Munich's Oktoberfest. Many celebrants ended up in the hospital. Drunken pedestrians can be at risk as well. Taking the bus is a reasonable and inexpensive way to let someone else drive.