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 160 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
for Willa and Mary Henderson
This week’s topic: Zero Vision
Vision Zero is an excellent example of SF’s zero vision
SF had 25 pedestrian and bicyclist deaths in 2013. Vision Zero was adopted by SF in 2014 to eliminate all traffic fatalities by 2024. How have we done so far?
year
|
2014
|
2015
|
2016
|
2017
|
2018
|
2019
|
2020
|
2021
|
2022
|
pedestrians and cyclists killed by car
|
24
|
24
|
20
|
16
|
18
|
18
|
14
|
15
|
10, as of 24 May
|
Lots of people are still dying on the roads. Vision Zero in SF turns out to be mostly zero vision because saying you’re doing something isn’t the same as actually doing it.
That’s not fair! What about bike lanes and road alterations?
These have been small, mostly cosmetic changes that haven’t dented the death toll. This is what happens when you talk big but avoid doing the work needed.1 Vision Zero’s core principle is that life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within society. Yet time and again, when car owners object to even little changes to institute safer roads in SF, you roll over and backtrack.
Now let’s look at the planet
Heatwaves, megadrought, massive flooding, weather whiplash, increasing rate of extinctions, highest CO2 levels in the existence of our species, year-round fire seasons, crop failures, plunging ocean pH, desertification and so much more are all happening NOW. So SF declared a climate emergency but…
You still don’t act.
Just like with Vision Zero, you know what has to be done and in what order for SF to have any chance of surviving climate chaos. You’ve got the information necessary to start acting, from legislative supports to insurance money sources, from contacts domestic and foreign to the science, and more. But you still are piddling around the edges of this Grand Canyon of a problem, as if piddling is going to do anything at all. If you think the deaths from automotive mayhem on the streets are big, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The forces we’ve unleashed at the planetary level are not human scale, they are tsunami level. Tsunami after tsunami after tsunami rolling toward SF, but they can be mitigated and survived. IF. YOU. ACT.
Zero Vision
What’s stopping you? Are you scared for your political career? You won’t have a political career if you let SF die. Are you worried your personal relationships will suffer if you act? You won’t have any personal relationships to protect if you allow the planet to become unlivable. Are you panicked that people will call you alarmist or crazy? Grow tf up; the science community, the people who know what’s going on, is in full-blown panic because this situation is so very very bad.2 Are you slothful, beholden to oligarchs, cheaply bought, easily cowed, in denial, living in fantasy as much as possible — what? What is so important that you will let the entire planet burn before you act?
What does it take to get you to act?
How many deaths are enough? Are you going to let the fossil fuel companies do to SF what the gun manufacturers and their allies have done to school safety, democracy, and civil society in the U.S.?
What will make you act?
FOOTNOTES
1. S.N. “Why Sweden has so few road deaths”. The Economist. 23 September 2016. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/02/26/why-sweden-has-so-few-road-deaths.
2. Zack Colman and Karl Mathiesen. “‘Get scared’: World’s scientists say disastrous climate change is here”. Politico. 9 August 2021. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/09/climate-change-scientists-report-disastrous-502799.