You don’t need a traffic cop to know that Boston intersections can be hazardous to your health. Take Mass. Ave. near Beacon Street in the Back Bay. Last August, Anita Kurmann, a 38-year-old surgeon, was killed when her bicycle was hit by a flatbed truck making a turn there. Or Mass. Ave. at Melnea Cass Boulevard, where 16 lanes of traffic converge. Or the confusing snarl at Kenmore Square. Everyone on two feet or two wheels can identify their own personal peril spots. But traffic accidents are up everywhere in Boston; we are saved from far worse carnage mostly by winding, congested streets that keep speeds down. Indeed, in the same month Kurmann was killed, 62 bicyclists in Boston were injured badly enough to require attention by emergency medical technicians, and 65 pedestrians needed EMTs.
These figures come from a new traffic crash map posted online by the City of Boston’s Vision Zero initiative, which the city joined last year. Started in 1997 in Sweden, Vision Zero tosses out the traditional cost-benefit analyses of planners and economists to declare that no fatalities are acceptable on the roads. At least a dozen major US cities have adopted its principles, the core one being that human safety takes priority over mobility, convenience, or any other objective of the streetscape. In Sweden, the program has improved an already good safety record; Stockholm now has the fewest reported traffic fatalities per capita of any city in the world.
What’s interesting about Vision Zero is how simple and tactical its safety interventions can be. Once a hazardous intersection is identified, there’s little need for a ponderous traffic study or new zoning overlays. “Small changes can have a profound effect,’’ says Gina Fiandaca, the city’s transportation commissioner.
After Kurmann’s death last year, the city went into rapid-response mode. It moved a bus stop a few hundred feet to improve visibility along that block of Mass. Ave. It trimmed vegetation, made new pavement markings, and installed flexible safety posts to protect cyclists. Mass. Ave. is one of two priority zones the city will be safety-bombing with attention in 2016; the other is around Norfolk Street in Codman Square. Action items include lowering the speed limit to 20 miles per hour, posting electronic warnings, and changing walk signals to give pedestrians a four-second head start before the traffic light turns green. Obvious, perhaps, but until now overlooked.
Another helpful feature of Boston’s Vision Zero program is an interactive map where residents can report areas of concern: obstructed views, chronic speeding, yield signs observed more in the breach. With its color-coded icons for each kind of hazard, the map is a riotous garden of fix-it spots, with new ones blooming by the day. The city will use that collected data to identify new priority zones.
In Massachusetts, more people are killed by cars than by guns. And yet the state has surprisingly weak traffic safety laws. Though better than some, Massachusetts only has one of the three traffic laws advocates have identified as crucial to reducing deaths: requiring motorcycle helmets. The state does not treat failure to wear seat belts as a primary offense (drivers must first be cited for another violation), despite the fact that 49 percent of people killed in traffic accidents in 2014 were not wearing seat belts, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And we don’t mandate ignition lock devices for all offenders convicted of driving drunk, though a bill to do so is under consideration.
City officials are quick to say the state is cooperating with Vision Zero efforts, but both jurisdictions can do more. When it come to preventing traffic deaths, you have to look both ways.
Renée Loth's column appears regularly in the Globe.
