It's definitely bad for Vision Zero advocates to have things framed this way, but it's also genuinely happening. The case of Indianapolis is instructive -- the GOP-dominated state house keeps passing bills to make traffic safety, public transit, urbanism, etc harder and sprawl easier. The suburban representatives who do this explicitly frame traffic safety as a leftist plot to make it harder to drive in the city. And in the Dem-dominated Indianapolis city government, support for safe streets is strongly correlated with how left the politician is.
I switched to exclusively taking public transit back in 2005 and I never looked back, but I still feel the frustration of red-light right-turn bans from my days living in Ottawa, where it was *impossible* to turn right legally at certain intersections: when I had a green light, pedestrians would cross my path until my light turned red (and usually *after* my light turned red because they ignored pedestrian walk/don't walk signals), so I had to drive far out of my way to get where I wanted to go. To me, that extra driving and idling was worse for the environment. I also expect it could be worse for safety if frustrated drivers tried to wedge themselves between pedestrians before the light turned red again.
Many such cases! There are times when right-turn on red helps and there are times it hurts. The issue is a blind spot for urbanists because it sounds good to say “prioritize people, not cars” without thinking through context. Yes, prioritize people and protect anyone in the crosswalk. That doesn’t require eliminating every single right-turn on red.
I think one reason street safety reads Blue on a gut level is because it can so easily be framed as what people won’t be able to do: turn right on red, go as fast as they want wherever they want, drive on certain streets. That can easily be painted as ‘the bicyclists want to take away your FREEDOM.’ But there are all sorts of FREEDOMS that would be restored with safer streets: the freedom of kids to traverse their neighborhood safely, freedom for me to get to work by bike, freedoms from the danger imposed by dangerous drivers. It’s a freer place where you can reasonably get around via a range of modes, and people who want to see safer streets should take that tack.
One of my favorite ways to get the freedom caucus fired up is to show them how local government policies erode our liberty to move around. Get them to see that the infrastructure status quo is a decades-long bipartisan attack on mobility freedom.
On a related note, I really like your framing of the article as "factual but not truthful" because that describes a ton of journalism: the writer takes pains to make sure their claims are technically correct but clearly doesn't have the dissemination of insight as one of their goals.
It's definitely bad for Vision Zero advocates to have things framed this way, but it's also genuinely happening. The case of Indianapolis is instructive -- the GOP-dominated state house keeps passing bills to make traffic safety, public transit, urbanism, etc harder and sprawl easier. The suburban representatives who do this explicitly frame traffic safety as a leftist plot to make it harder to drive in the city. And in the Dem-dominated Indianapolis city government, support for safe streets is strongly correlated with how left the politician is.
If that is the way Republicans what to frame it, what can one do?
So… do we need a Strong Towns party for me and all my independent (wink wink) friends?
I switched to exclusively taking public transit back in 2005 and I never looked back, but I still feel the frustration of red-light right-turn bans from my days living in Ottawa, where it was *impossible* to turn right legally at certain intersections: when I had a green light, pedestrians would cross my path until my light turned red (and usually *after* my light turned red because they ignored pedestrian walk/don't walk signals), so I had to drive far out of my way to get where I wanted to go. To me, that extra driving and idling was worse for the environment. I also expect it could be worse for safety if frustrated drivers tried to wedge themselves between pedestrians before the light turned red again.
Many such cases! There are times when right-turn on red helps and there are times it hurts. The issue is a blind spot for urbanists because it sounds good to say “prioritize people, not cars” without thinking through context. Yes, prioritize people and protect anyone in the crosswalk. That doesn’t require eliminating every single right-turn on red.
I think one reason street safety reads Blue on a gut level is because it can so easily be framed as what people won’t be able to do: turn right on red, go as fast as they want wherever they want, drive on certain streets. That can easily be painted as ‘the bicyclists want to take away your FREEDOM.’ But there are all sorts of FREEDOMS that would be restored with safer streets: the freedom of kids to traverse their neighborhood safely, freedom for me to get to work by bike, freedoms from the danger imposed by dangerous drivers. It’s a freer place where you can reasonably get around via a range of modes, and people who want to see safer streets should take that tack.
One of my favorite ways to get the freedom caucus fired up is to show them how local government policies erode our liberty to move around. Get them to see that the infrastructure status quo is a decades-long bipartisan attack on mobility freedom.
Thank you for saying this.
On a related note, I really like your framing of the article as "factual but not truthful" because that describes a ton of journalism: the writer takes pains to make sure their claims are technically correct but clearly doesn't have the dissemination of insight as one of their goals.
It's like popping a red pill from the Matrix. Once you see "factual but not truthful" you can't unsee it.