Reply to More MOCO Upzoning - Starting in Silver Spring

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If they want to drop the missing middle rezoning proposal and just do this one maybe that is a reasonable compromise, but upzoning everything is a bad idea. Vision zero is idiotic and unrealistic though. The goal of reducing traffic fatalities attainable, but we need to balance operational concerns with safety improvements. The only way to achieve basically zero traffic deaths would be to reduce speed limit to 15 mph everywhere. Ridiculous policy goals like vision zero will harm society more than it helps. [/quote]

How many deaths do you think it's worth for you to get somewhere 5 minutes faster in your car? How about 10 minutes faster in your car? Also, is it ok for people in your family to be killed or seriously injured in a car crash, or should car crash deaths and serious injuries be limited to people in other people's families?[/quote]

You are ignoring the real-world trade offs that are involved in something like vision zero. Traffic deaths will never be zero unless we reduce the speed limits to 15 mph everywhere. There are very serious and negative consequences to reducing the speed limits substantially.  For example, my doctors office that is now 30 around minutes away will take me around 1 hour and 30 minutes to get to if we lower the speed limit to 15mph. Multiply increases in transportation time across all of the county residents and the amount of time wasted will be astronomical. MOCO only has 39 traffic deaths per year on average. Applying the average demographics of MOCO residents indicates the the each of these people that die in a car accident are losing about 341,871 hours of their life. So any policy that waste more than this amount of other peoples time each year for every death prevented in car accidents is not a smart policy decision. Increasing the average daily driving time by 6 minutes a day for even 10,000 county residents wastes more hours than of peoples time than the hours of life gained by a single person who does not die in a car accident. I am supportive of policies that reduce traffic deaths given that a sufficient cost-benefit analysis is conducted. But it is foolish to pretend that any of these policies provide a free lunch. There are tradeoffs with pursuing policies and the vision zero proponents are largely ignoring this. [/quote]

Are you listening to yourself? [/quote]

I am not the PP, but the PP is a realist.  Traffic deaths will NEVER be ZERO.  Not really possible.  Similarly, poverty will never be eliminated.  You can work on the edges, which we should of course do.  But ZERO is not humanly possible.  Welcome to the real world, where bad sh-t happens unfortunately.[/quote]

It is possible to have zero car crash deaths, though.

However, for the sake of argument: what do you consider an acceptable number of people killed in car crashes?[/quote]

The acceptable level is determine by how much the government can reasonably afford to spend to reduce it and the impact on overall commute time. This is no different than society determining that there is a maximum amount that is reasonable to spend on medical care to prevent one death. The government cannot afford to spend (and should not) spend 1 million dollars on medical care for a cancer therapy that boost a persons life expectancy by one year. Spending exorbitant amount of money for small gains it wasteful and it allocates resources to activities that provide minimal benefits to society. There is a absolutely a value that must be assigned to human life because no government has unlimited resources. We need to prioritize spending where it has the largest impact and benefit for society. [/quote]

Currently it's about 40 people killed in car crashes every year in Montgomery County. Is that an acceptable number for you? [/quote]

It depends on how much it costs to reduce the number. If we can reduce average traffic deaths by 1 person per year for a reasonable upfront cost, then no it is too high. If the county is going to spend $15 million upfront and it cost taxpayers an extra 100k a year on gasoline from additional time spent in traffic.  (To prevent one traffic death on average, then I would say it’s a waste of money. It would be more useful to use that money elsewhere, (eg. Providing free high blood pressure screening and medication for low income households) this would help a lot more people and prevent more many more deaths than the one person saved each year from reducing traffic deaths. So it depends on how much it costs. If we are going to spend 100 million to reduce annual traffic deaths by 15% in the county, then yes this would be a huge waste of money and the current level of deaths is acceptable. [/quote]

Montgomery County may do things differently, but you can absolutely reduce crashes in ways that pencil out in the long term. That's even if you don't value the lives/injuries of the people involved.

Just one example is to replace signaled intersections with roundabouts. You'll reduce crash frequency, crash severity, maintenance costs and increase resiliency during storms/disasters. You also make traffic flow better since people are stuck at red lights constantly. Carmel Indiana replaced most of its lights with roundabouts over a 20 year period and has a fatality rate about half of Montgomery's despite being even more car-centric.

There are plenty of other cheap/easy/long term beneficial changes that increase safety. [/quote]

Replacing a single traffic light intersection with a round about will cost in excess of a million dollars. There are more than 875 intersections with traffic lights in MOCO. Some of these intersections are larger than 1 or 2 lanes, so they will cost multiple millions to replace rather than a few. So the total cost of replacing all of suitable intersection traffic lights with round abouts will be in excess of 2 billion dollars. If this works similarly to Caramel you are still spending at least 50 million dollars to reduce yearly traffic deaths by 1 person. That is an incredible waste of money. There are numerous other things that the county can spend 50 million dollars on which will provide much greater benefits. [/quote]

I'll put this in a way that makes more sense to drivers. For the same price as adding one lane for one mile on a minor road, you could have a dozen or more roundabout conversions. You will get a lot better traffic flow with a dozen roundabouts than one lane-mile. The safety benefit is now "free."

Once again presuming human life and health are without value. [/quote] 
You are making a magical assumption that doesn’t mesh with reality given that there are finite resources. This logic is well-intentioned, but it will actually cause more deaths because the county will end up consuming finite resources on economically unproductive uses. Just for comparison 50 million is enough to give every resident in the county a bottle of Narcan. There were around 100 overdose deaths last year and this  use of 50 million would prevent much more than 1 death. [/quote]

You're all over the place here. Should the "cost benefit analysis" include ONLY costs DIRECTLY paid by Montgomery County, or shouldn't it? If it should include ONLY costs DIRECTLY paid by Montgomery County, it shouldn't include drive time.

It should, however, include the costs of responding to car crashes, which is directly paid by Montgomery County.[/quote]

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