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]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]

They're right. Why don't we have 15 mph speed limits on the beltway or 270? Because eventually we make the determination that some risk is appropriate so that people can get to where they're going. Similarly, there are some jobs with a significant risk of death (https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-jobs-in-the-united-states); we don't abolish those jobs, though I suppose that's what you'd prefer. Why do we insist on vision zero so that people can jaywalk rampantly, but allow the professions of roofing and garbage collecting to continue?

You should take a law school torts class, where they teach that we put a value on human life in basically everything we do. [/quote]

Normal people: we should do what we can to reduce hazards that kill people.
People who have taken a law school torts class, apparently: well ACKSHUALLY sometimes it's acceptable for some people to die so that other people can have what they want.[/quote]

So we should just ban cars entirely so we can reduce traffic deaths to zero?? Most Americans do not want this and and they accept on some fundamental level that there will be some level of traffic deaths that is unavoidable. It can definitely be reduced from where it is now, but zero deaths is both unrealistic and undesirable due to tradeoffs. [/quote]

But it's not necessary to ban cars in order to reduce traffic deaths to zero.

https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-daylighting-pedestrian-safety-007dec67706c1c09129da1436a3d9762

And as you say, it's also a desirable goal to simply reduce the number of people killed in car crashes. For example, by building transit-accessible housing, bikeways, and bus rapid transit (BRT), as well as creating a complete street with wider sidewalks, comfortable public transportation stops, and safe access. [/quote]

Hoboken is an example that is not particularly replicable in most of the US. Only 20% of resident there own a car and most Americans do not want to live in an area with that level of density. The maximum  speed limit for the entire city of Hoboken is only 20 mph, so you are actually proving my point that you need to reduce the speed limit to extremely low speeds everywhere to make vision zero possible.  This may be workable in Hoboken, but reducing the speed limit everywhere to some ridiculously low speed will have terrible consequences for overall quality of life and the economy in MOCO. [/quote]

You: It's not possible to reach zero deaths from car crashes!
Me: Yes it is.
You: Well ok it actually is, but I don't want it to happen here.[/quote]

You are missing the point. Hoboken has a density level more than 22x that of MOCO. Most of the county will never have a density close to Hoboken and this solution is unworkable here. [/quote]

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