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It’s a sad irony that while city council was contemplating the fate of ghost bikes, the son-in-law of a former councillor was in a collision while riding his bike. It’d be easy to try to use the collision in the fight for ghost bikes, but it’d be wrong. City council rubber-stamping roadside memorials would do nothing for safety. The two are not linked, but they are connected. Collisions and antipathy towards ghost bikes are both the products of a political machine that continuously values life less than traffic flow and bookkeeping.
It is time for this to end. It is time for Ottawa to adopt the philosophy of Vision Zero.
At its core, Vision Zero is about two things: valuing life and bringing responsibility back to our streets. We should accept no more than zero deaths and zero serious injuries on our streets. This will require a shift in infrastructure, enforcement and education, and it will require empathy and humility.
Typically, when the city contemplates street construction and re-construction, traffic flow, parking and the views of businesses are paramount. City planners aren’t against safety measures, per se, but there has to be a business case, a cost-benefit analysis. We may save a life or two, but will it add three minutes to someone’s commute? This is a trade-off with which our city typically struggles.
Vision Zero eschews such cost-benefit analysis. There is no business case that can killings in our street. Your life is, without question, more valuable than shaving three minutes off a commute.
We should value all life, drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists. Anyone on our streets deserves to valued. It doesn’t matter if someone is from out-of-town or has been convicted of a crime. Despite the implications of the city’s new policy, human life doesn’t come with a built-in hierarchy; everyone deserves to be protected, cherished and mourned, should they be killed.
It doesn’t matter if the deceased caused the collision. Vision Zero acknowledges human fallibility and demands that infrastructure be built to protect us at our worst, not just at our best. The texting driver, the un-lit bicyclist, the distracted pedestrian, they all deserve to live, and our infrastructure needs to reflect that.
But we get hung up on responsibility … well, that’s not true. We get hung up on blame. We are far less concerned with responsibility. However, if we were to adopt a Vision Zero approach, we would eschew blame for responsibility. Certainly, we should use the legal system to seek justice (though there is little evidence we currently do this), but we should also worry about our communal responsibility.
Adopting Vision Zero would mean a number of measures would need to be undertaken by the city. Our streets need diets; they need to be narrowed. Our streets need to be slower, and speed limits and infrastructure need to reflect this. And our streets need to be forgiving. Drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists are going to make mistakes, our streets need to limit the damage that can be done when people make mistakes.
So let’s move on from the ghost bike debate, and let’s move on from talking about safety measures for the few dangerous locations that are currently home to ghost bikes. They’re just the winnings of the morbid lottery that is our dangerous infrastructure.
If we are to offer a memorial, let’s lower the flags at City Hall when someone, anyone, is killed in our streets. In the end, it is we — the residents, the planners, the politicians, the city — who are responsible, because we demand nothing safer than the status quo.
Jonathan McLeod is an Ottawa writer.
查看原文...
It is time for this to end. It is time for Ottawa to adopt the philosophy of Vision Zero.
At its core, Vision Zero is about two things: valuing life and bringing responsibility back to our streets. We should accept no more than zero deaths and zero serious injuries on our streets. This will require a shift in infrastructure, enforcement and education, and it will require empathy and humility.
Typically, when the city contemplates street construction and re-construction, traffic flow, parking and the views of businesses are paramount. City planners aren’t against safety measures, per se, but there has to be a business case, a cost-benefit analysis. We may save a life or two, but will it add three minutes to someone’s commute? This is a trade-off with which our city typically struggles.
Vision Zero eschews such cost-benefit analysis. There is no business case that can killings in our street. Your life is, without question, more valuable than shaving three minutes off a commute.
We should value all life, drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists. Anyone on our streets deserves to valued. It doesn’t matter if someone is from out-of-town or has been convicted of a crime. Despite the implications of the city’s new policy, human life doesn’t come with a built-in hierarchy; everyone deserves to be protected, cherished and mourned, should they be killed.
It doesn’t matter if the deceased caused the collision. Vision Zero acknowledges human fallibility and demands that infrastructure be built to protect us at our worst, not just at our best. The texting driver, the un-lit bicyclist, the distracted pedestrian, they all deserve to live, and our infrastructure needs to reflect that.
But we get hung up on responsibility … well, that’s not true. We get hung up on blame. We are far less concerned with responsibility. However, if we were to adopt a Vision Zero approach, we would eschew blame for responsibility. Certainly, we should use the legal system to seek justice (though there is little evidence we currently do this), but we should also worry about our communal responsibility.
Adopting Vision Zero would mean a number of measures would need to be undertaken by the city. Our streets need diets; they need to be narrowed. Our streets need to be slower, and speed limits and infrastructure need to reflect this. And our streets need to be forgiving. Drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists are going to make mistakes, our streets need to limit the damage that can be done when people make mistakes.
So let’s move on from the ghost bike debate, and let’s move on from talking about safety measures for the few dangerous locations that are currently home to ghost bikes. They’re just the winnings of the morbid lottery that is our dangerous infrastructure.
If we are to offer a memorial, let’s lower the flags at City Hall when someone, anyone, is killed in our streets. In the end, it is we — the residents, the planners, the politicians, the city — who are responsible, because we demand nothing safer than the status quo.
Jonathan McLeod is an Ottawa writer.
查看原文...
