Arlington Virginia's Vision Zero Statements Defy Logic: Part 1 of 6.

This is a six part series dedicated to showing just how weak and meaningless Arlington's current Vision Zero goals are.     We will go through each of six statements residents were asked to comment on and explain why each is illogical and will just result in more death and serious injuries.   We encourage Arlington's leadership to consider these flaws and to rewrite and rethink Vision Zero.    We also encourage you to share these posts and send them to Arlington Virginia's so called leadership.   

ArlingtonVA Statement 1: Vision Zero in Arlington will strive to ensure safe transportation no matter how you get around. 

This statement is fundamentally disturbing because safe streets aren't about equality, they are about equity. 

So what I really hear in this statement is that we aren't going to ban any forms of transportation no matter how deadly those forms of transportation are to users of other forms of transportation.   
If you are going to choose to make SUVs legal, a vehicle that is 4x more deadly than even a car to children aged 5-9, then you are not going to have Vision Zero.   Particularly, you aren't going to have Vision Zero when you continue to allow these vehicles to come in massive numbers into school zones. 

Even more so you aren't going to achieve vision zero if you allow these vehicles into central urban areas of Arlington with high numbers of pedestrian.   But forget SUVs, If you want to save lives you have to ban vehicles in general from urban areas, especially central urban areas with large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists.   Or at least you have to make it very difficult to drive and make parking non-existent.

Now, as someone who as actually been to Oslo, I am going to teach everybody a lesson about how you actually get to Vision Zero.   Oslo, a city with several times the population of Arlington Virginia saw zero pedestrian and cyclist deaths in 2019.   So a lot of people imagine Norwegians, which they stereotype simply as Scandinavians, as being really concerned with how everyone feels.>Having been to Oslo I can tell you it isn't like that at all in Oslo.   People in Oslo don't really do chatty formalities.    People in Oslo don't worry about if someone is offended.    Instead, they do the logical things that the larger community needs in order to survive, stay alive and even thrive.

So Arlington politicians, if you really want Vision Zero, than stop worrying about offending people and get on with making the central urban areas car-free.    Stop making parking free on Sundays and in the evenings.    In fact, get rid of the parking completely and build something useful like housing
or urban vertical gardens. 

                              

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