Vision Zero Promised to End Traffic Deaths in Cities. Why Did It Fail?

Not a single moose has been hit by a car in Brooklyn

In 2014, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a ‘Vision Zero’ plan to eliminate traffic deaths in 10 years.

Last year, there were 252 traffic deaths. By the time he left office, traffic deaths were up 26%.

Next year, former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti adopted Vision Zero and promised to reduce “traffic fatalities to zero by 2025.”

“It is tragic that 200 people are killed each year while moving about our city,” Garcetti vowed. “I am determined to bring that number down to zero.”

Since then traffic deaths climbed from 245 to 368 in 2024.

In Washington D.C., Mayor Muriel E. Bowser adopted a Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024. Instead D.C. recorded a 16-year-high of traffic deaths in 2024.

San Francisco also promised to end traffic deaths in ten years, but in 2023 it recorded the highest number of traffic deaths since 2023.

A Bloomberg article recently conceded that “it’s hard to find any Vision Zero cities where traffic deaths have declined.” Along with failures like New York, LA and D.C., it recorded the fact that traffic deaths are up in other cities that subscribed to the Vision Zero like Portland and Austin.

While Vision Zero hasn’t reduced traffic deaths to zero or really reduced them much if at all, it has been enormously profitable for consultants and advocates. Mayors and city council, enraptured by the big vision of ending traffic deaths, threw millions at Vision Zero programs.

Why didn’t Vision Zero work? Bloomberg traveled to Sweden, where Vision Zero originated, and concluded that the Swedes were just better at following rules than the ugly Americans.

One thing the magazine didn’t consider was moose.

Vision Zero came out of Sweden where moose remain a leading cause of car accidents. Moose collisions shot up 500% in the 1970s and by the 1980s became the cause of a third of accidents on highways. Around the time that Vision Zero became popular in America, there were some 7,000 moose traffic accidents. In that same decade, 39 people died and 120 people were seriously injured. While the world snickered when a Swedish moose crash test dummy won an Ig Nobel award a few years ago, the joke was really on us for adopting Vision Zero.

Sweden has the densest population of moose in the world and despite Vision Zero, the number of moose accidents rose 77% and the number of people going to the ER after colliding with a moose was up 26%. An editorial warned that the “moose stands in the way of Vision Zero.”

The country’s Moose Injury Fund which sells collision insurance in the event of hitting not only moose, but reindeer, bears, wolves, wolverines and otters, also recorded over 55,000 collisions with deer, 8,702 boar collisions and (somewhat bafflingly) 75 collisions with eagles.

Sweden is not America. More specifically, it’s not New York, L.A. or D.C. which.have very few moose wandering the streets and whose problems are very different. The entire population of Stockholm, Sweden’s biggest city, would fit into a neighborhood in either NYC or LA.

66% of traffic deaths in Sweden happen on rural roads. Many involve trucks along with snow and icy road conditions. None of this made a Swedish road safety program developed under very different social and geographic conditions a good fit for major moose-free U.S. cities.

When NYC, Philly and other cities rushed to adopt Vision Zero, they cited statistics claiming that “traffic fatalities have dropped 30% since 1997” since Sweden adopted Vision Zero.

Was that because Vision Zero was working so well?

Around this same period, the number of passenger cars in Sweden decreased by 34.5%.

Is Sweden really reducing traffic deaths or reducing the number of cars on the road? While the numbers are mixed, between high carbon taxes, low birth rates and an aging population, recent new car registrations are underperforming and a significant percentage of drivers are elderly.

Since the 90s, the number of Swedish drivers over 65 has doubled while the number of drivers in every other age category, except 45-65, has remained stagnant. The average age of the Swedish bus driver is 51 years old and continuing to climb. This lopsided ratio could also account for a decline in traffic deaths, but not necessarily in traffic accidents.

American big city mayors could have looked at these numbers before spending millions of dollars adopting a program with a catchy slogan from a very different society. But consultants, bicycle pressure groups and mayors looking to make a name for themselves before running for higher office wasted countless millions and gave city residents a false sense of security.

Vision Zero’s solutions inflicted bike lanes on cities and neighborhoods that didn’t need them even though there is little evidence that bike lanes save lives or do anything except make life more convenient for young urban hipsters. Reconfiguring some streets can prevent some accidents, but cities didn’t need a Swedish import to figure that one out. The real solution was enforcement and that fell by the wayside with BLM and police defunding. But admitting that one trendy radical program got in the way of a somewhat less trendy radical program is heresy.

Reducing the number of traffic deaths to zero made for a great slogan, but was completely unrealistic. Even the architect of Sweden’s Vision Zero program was quickly forced to admit that. Nothing short of returning to the donkey and the mule is going to eliminate traffic deaths.

In 2008, Volvo, Sweden’s premier automaker, put out a press release declaring that its goal was to “build cars that cannot crash” and “that no one will be killed or injured in a Volvo by 2020.”

Obviously that did not happen. Slogans are easy. Reality is hard.

Around the same time that American cities were adopting Vision Zero, a delegate to a Vision Zero conference admitted that, “Vision Zero is not a number, it is a philosophy.”

How many American taxpayers living in cities that spent millions on Vision Zero programs were aware that it was a philosophy, not an actual policy with a real world target?

Perhaps a philosophy borrowed from a country of elderly drivers colliding with moose on rural roads was not the best strategy for reducing traffic deaths in New York and LA. But even as Vision Zero has failed in America, none of the politicians or consultants behind it will admit that.

Last year, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio hailed Vision Zero as a “revolutionary idea that worked beyond our wildest dreams” despite its failure. “We came along and took an idea from another continent and applied it radically in the biggest city in the country,” the disgraced former mayor boasted. “It’s not perfect, but it is a stunning start.”

De Blasio has a point. While thousands of people have been killed in car accidents, not a single moose has been hit by a car in Brooklyn.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.