Defense Doesn't Win Wars

Vision Zero: Switch to Offense

A street in Cincinnati, before cars.

I've been thinking lately that the forces of Vision Zero and Complete Streets are spending too much time trying to figure out how to defend against bad behavior by motorists, and not focusing on the source of the problem, which is bad behavior by motorists. Perhaps the murder of Dr. Friedes offers an opportunity for a reset.

When we accept bad behavior as inevitable, and instead focus on mitigating the damage, we are of course not alone. The U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, from their inception, have been primarily focused on protecting the occupants of vehicles. By making crashes safer for the perpetrators, we may in fact have been encouraging more bad behavior. I think, not so many years ago, Mr. Vahey would probably have died in the crash that he caused.

How can we make drivers drive more safely? Well, here's an idea: Make them drive slower. One way to do this is by installing speed governors in cars.

This is a very old idea. I first came across it in Peter D. Norton's Fighting Traffic (2011), where he talks about the Cincinnati speed governor war in 1923 (pp. 95-99). The pro-safety forces lost that war, and they helped create the very powerful pro-car lobby that we confront to this day.

In 1923, installing and operating speed governors would have been a cumbersome mechanical task, easily defeated by friendly car mechanics. Today, however, new cars effectively come with electronic speed governors. Cruise control is, of course, under the control of the driver, but it doesn't have to be. And cars now communicate regularly with the outside world, posting, for instance, the local speed limit on the dashboard. (For some recent articles, click here and here and here.)

How about establishing a speed governor zone in Philadelphia, perhaps starting with Center City? Center City would be easy to geofence, and it would be relatively simple to make all modern cars automatically conform to the local speed limit - 25 mph or, better, 20 mph.

I've seen geofencing in action in Asbury Park, where the city has a scooter share program. If you try to go across the bridge outside my living room window and leave the city, your scooter's engine will cease to operate. Also, if you try to ride your scooter on the boardwalk, the engine stops working. Push your scooter back within the geofence, and the motor starts again. 

Asbury Park scooter share scooters also have speed governors. The maximum speed is generally 12 mph; it is lower in certain areas that have high levels of pedestrian traffic. 

Frankly, thinking of the Asbury Park boardwalk, I don't see why you couldn't geofence the Pine-Spruce bike lanes. You'd probably have to let the cars go at two or three miles per hour so they could get out of the bike lane. If you stopped them completely, they'd just sit there and block the lane.

A proposal for a speed governor zone in Philadelphia would, of course, elicit massive, enraged opposition from the usual suspects. And I suspect, in the beginning, they would prevail. Long-term, I think this may be an idea whose time has come. And, in the interim, the pro-death crowd would be playing defense quite close to their own goal line.

I found the illustration at the beginning of  this story in Cincinnati Magazine. It's from 1893 and apparently lives at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

See also The Vigil for Dr. Friedes; What We Lost; We Should Not Overestimate the Driving Skills of the Typical Philadelphia Motorist; Cars and Bikes - the Back Story; What the Greeks Knew; Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different? and When Will Philly Get Scooters?