Vision Zero is a fundamentally different approach to road security that starts from the principle that every death or serious injury due to a collision is one too many. Road deaths are preventable.

While collisions are inevitable in densely populated areas like cities, you can and must strive to reduce the severity of such collisions. What a human body can cope with when hit by a vehicle must be taken as the reference point in our system.

Beyond 30km/h, the chances for a human being to die or be seriously injured from a collision increases disproportionally. Reducing speed is thus the most important factor of intervention.

People make mistakes, this is what makes us human. But no one deserves to die or end up in a wheel chair for making a mistake, especially children. This entails logically that human mistakes must be taken into consideration when designing our infrastructure.

It’s the notion of “forgiving infrastructure”. When designing these forgiving infrastructure, people’s safety is given more importance to than the fluidity of traffic.

References:

Core Elements for Vision Zero Communities, Vision Zero Network - read here

Sécurité Routière : Avec l’approche Vision Zero, faire de Trois-Rivières un précurseur, Vivre en Ville, mars 2019 - access the PDF (FR)