You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 125 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
This week: A CASE STUDY
We can judge the effectiveness of your actions in the fight against climate chaos by looking at the effectiveness of your actions on other life-or-death-but-not-immediate-mass-killer issues.1 Are there other issues like this in SF? Yes, there are. Let’s look at traffic fatalities and injuries.
What is Vision Zero?
SF eventually responded to our high traffic fatality and injury rate2, 3 by making Vision Zero official policy in 2014.4 Vision Zero started in Sweden in 1995 and is based on the core principle that “Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society.”5 SF’s Vision Zero focus, though, is on education first6, putting the onus for change on individuals instead of changing streets poorly designed without a basic understanding of physics.7
So how’s SF’s Vision Zero initiative going?
Badly. Here’s the data.8, 9 TLDR: the numbers are almost the same as before Vision Zero.
Why?
You’re failing because you’re focusing on the wrong problem. The problem isn’t the people who are getting injured and killed — the problem is the machines and infrastructure that turn human errors into deaths. Sweden knows road deaths are the fault of road engineers10 and car designers and manufacturers. Humans are not perfect, yet physical interactions involving masses and inertia are non-negotiable. A safe infrastructure builds that reality in; a bad one ignores it.
This is exactly why you’re failing SF on climate change
You are doing the same thing with climate change that you’re doing with traffic fatalities: The same misidentification of the problem, the same bait and switch to keep rich donors happy, the same pissant focus, the same lack of credible results, the same waving of hands and shrugging of shoulders while the death count rises. You’re messing around at the edges when massive, deep, central changes are needed to accomplish anything.
And SF’s road fatalities are so much smaller than the deaths coming with climate change.11
On top of that, you often make deliberate, awful anti-environment choices
For instance, how can you still not care that California is in a megadrought?12 It’s as if you think physical realities don’t apply to you. They do.
You’re killing SF — literally
Dear Editor,
San Francisco’s leaders keep showing us they’re not up to the enormous mitigation and adaptation efforts needed for SF to survive climate change. Just as they’ve failed to reduce traffic deaths with their watered down version of Vision Zero, their actions on climate change are a lot of noise that has accomplished almost nothing. For example, they are wasting our money and resources to sue the state for water that doesn’t exist. We’re in a megadrought, a megadrought made worse by climate change, yet our leaders believe it’s better to go to court than listen to the science and take concrete, physical actions — like installing blackwater recycling, fixing our sewer/rainwater system, increasing permeable surface area, and much more. If our leaders can’t follow the simple science that makes Vision Zero work in other places, how can we trust them with climate change?
FOOTNOTES
1. As opposed to immediate big killers, such as Covid-19, which SF has done very well on.
2. “Dangerous By Design 2021”. Smart Growth America. Accessed 14 September 2021. https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design/.
3. “SF officials call fatal collisions involving pedestrians, cyclists a ‘crisis’; woman killed”. KTVU FOX 2. 9 March 2019. https://www.ktvu.com/news/sf-officials-call-fatal-collisions-involving-pedestrians-cyclists-a-crisis-woman-killed.
4. “Vision Zero”. Walk San Francisco. Accessed 14 September 2021. https://walksf.org/our-work/campaigns/vision-zero/.
5. Claes Tingvall and Narelle Haworth. “Vision Zero - An ethical approach to safety and mobility”. Monash University Accident Research Centre. 6-7 October 1999. https://www.monash.edu/muarc/archive/our-publications/papers/visionzero.
6. See “Vision Zero In Action”. Vision Zero SF. Accessed 14 September 2021. https://www.visionzerosf.org.
7. F = ma and the concept of inertia covers what’s needed. This isn’t rocket science.
8. “2021 Traffic Fatality Monthly Report”. Vision Zero SF. Accessed 14 September 2021. https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/08.2021Fatalities_AugustSummaryMemo-1.pdf.
9. “Traffic Fatalities”. City Performance Scorecards. Accessed 14 September 2021. https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fatalities.
10. Sarah Goodyear. “The Swedish Approach to Road Safety: ‘The Accident Is Not the Major Problem’”. CityLab. 20 November 2014. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-20/the-swedish-approach-to-road-safety-the-accident-is-not-the-major-problem.
11. Kollibri terre Sonnenblume. “Climate Change: Why is it So Often ‘Sooner than Predicted’?” Resilience. 19 June 2019. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-06-19/climate-change-why-is-it-so-often-sooner-than-predicted/.
12. Kurtis Alexander. “San Francisco, agriculture suppliers want their water, sue state over drought restrictions”. San Francisco Chronicle. 7 September 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-agriculture-suppliers-want-their-16441655.php.