Objectives

Vision Zero Vancouver pushes for zero deaths and serious injuries on Metro Vancouver streets.

Principles

Human life and health over other objectives like traffic throughput.
Traffic violence is not inevitable. Stopping it is possible and necessary.
Traffic deaths and serious injuries are more than personal tragedies. They are systemic. And they require systemic solutions.
Emphasizing individual responsibility of road users cannot solve this systemic problem.
Those who build and govern our transportation system bear the greatest responsibility for traffic safety.
The most reliable, proven way to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries is with physical road design elements.
Road users are imperfect. Road design should make it unlikely for road users to err, and if they do err no one has to die or get a permanent disability.

The Hierarchy of Controls is a model on protecting people from hazards. It can be used to evaluate whether a measure is effective in preventing traffic violence. Graphic by Qagreenways.

Policy objectives

Click each item below to learn more about each of our policy objectives.

30 km/h default speed limit

The vehicular speed limit for environments where there are people outside of cars should be no more than 30 km/h. If a person is hit by a driver at this speed, they have a 90% chance of surviving. But in BC the default speed limit is 50 km/h, much more fatal. This means municipalities have to invest in signage to set safer speed limits.

Adapted from Jurewicz et al. (2016). Exploration of Vehicle Impact Speed – Injury Severity Relationships for Application in Safer Road Design.

A major funding increase for road safety infrastructure

Cities like Vancouver receive over 600 resident requests for road safety improvements (e.g. controlled pedestrian crossings) annually but only a few get funded each year. Spending on safer streets pays off by avoiding hospitalization costs ($92,000 per day in Vancouver) and other costs of crashes.

Prohibit right-on-red (RoR) turns

In BC, drivers have the option of turning right on red lights unless prohibited by signage. RoR serve to save some time on car trips but at the expense of safety for people outside of cars. Drivers attempting RoR mostly pay attention to car traffic from the left and not on people crossing or about to cross. RoR also incentivizes drivers to stop (if at all!) on crosswalks, pushing people closer to moving car traffic.

Leading pedestrian intervals (LPIs)

This means pedestrians get the crossing signal ahead of green light for drivers. LPIs make pedestrians more visible to turning drivers, reinforce their right of way and reduce drivers crashing into people.

Crash investigations that list all contributing factors and recommend specific changes.

Currently crash investigations are done by the police and look for laws that were broken. Investigations should also probe how the road design made the crash likely. This is to instigate a redesign of the crash site and other similar locations.