It has nothing to do with enforcement and everything to do with roads being interconnected and naturally load balancing thanks to modern gps routing.

You slow down a main through road it puts that traffic right onto residential roads that formerly weren't worth taking and so someone's kid who used to ride their bike in the street has to either stop or risk getting turned into paste.

I live in a state with stringent roadworthiness inspections BTW.

> Don't even get me started on how easy it is to get a driver's license with no clue how to drive. If they wanted to reduce deaths they should start by raising the bar on license difficulty.

Retesting is vital, too. Every 10 years. And if you have something like 3 moving violations you should have to do some community service, and retake the test.

I don't believe in fines on individuals: if the punishment for a crime is a fine, that law only applies to the poor. If you insist on endangering the lives of the people around you, then you get the same inconvenience as anyone else.

> Seattle lowered the speed limit on a lot of roads, but didn't do much else beyond add a few "No turn on red" signs.

As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.

My city has been doing traffic calming projects where they redesign the road for the speed they want people to drive at and that has actually worked well.

All lowering the speed limit does is make it easier for cops to harass poor people, it doesn’t actually change the way people drive.

Sigh. You people are like these climate change deniers who are saying that "the climate is cooling" because this year is slightly cooler than the previous one.

Your own article has a chart with the number of deaths by year, and the noisy upward trend from 2016 is pretty clear. But I admit that I did not check the data for 2025 before I wrote my post.

So my post can be amended to: "Increased or stayed the same". There is definitely no _decrease_ compared to the previous state.

Population in SF is also decreasing by large single digit numbers.

There was at least one bike death last year (https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2025/12/14/person-biking-on-...) at least one this year (https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2026/02/woman-hit-and-kil...) but it looks like 2024 might have been a year with no bicycle related fatalities.

[dead]

So I provided them in another post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242382 ). Does that change anything in your attitude towards the Zero Vision policies?

The data shows that these policies have comprehensively failed in Seattle, SF, and Portland. They did not result in a decrease in deaths through the use of traffic engineering. There are likely multiple reasons why that happened, but that's beside the point here and should be a subject of at least several PhD theses.

Yet these policies measurably worsened the average quality of life by increasing congestion, and lengthening the average commutes.

So given these data, what should be done next?

[dead]

Quick question: are you an urbanist?

> "The city saw 25 traffic deaths in 2025, down from 43 in 2024"

The number of traffic deaths in SF in 2016 before the main enshittification started: 30. Deaths in 2017: 20.

Here's a chart for Seattle: https://wtsc.wa.gov/dashboards/fatalities-dashboard/ - it went from 6 fatalities in 2016 to 20 fatalities last year.

Same for Portland, it went up from 13 to 22.

Sorry, but the data is completely unambiguous. The Zero Vision policies _at_ _best_ had no effect, and at worst resulted in additional deaths.