CONVERSATION
San Francisco’s 2014 pledge to eliminate traffic deaths by this year has been a tragic letdown. The city just turned the calendar on its deadliest year — 39 deaths — since taking the Vision Zero pledge.
The Vision Zero movement started in Scandinavia more than 25 years ago and has transformed street safety in Europe. Norway’s capital Oslo, with nearly 90 percent of SF’s population, had only one traffic death in 2021.
The United States has had no such luck. Many cities have taken the pledge, including Los Angeles and New York, yet American pedestrian deaths are at an all-time high.
But not in Hoboken, New Jersey. The birthplace of Frank Sinatra, across the Hudson River from New York City, stands out as the only U.S. city to tally zero traffic deaths the last four years.
Can San Francisco (47 square miles) learn lessons from a much smaller city (2 square miles) with less than 10 percent of SF’s population?
Local bike advocate Chris Adair thinks so. The 20-year Hoboken resident began riding around town when bike shares arrived. Trips by bike, she says, were easier and faster, but she was nervous sharing the city’s narrow, one-way roads with cars. (That fear of sharing lane space is what keeps many people from biking, as The Frisc has reported.)
A Bay Area native, Adair joined the Bike Hoboken volunteer group and helped start a “bike bus” to encourage families to bike to school together. “It really changes the vision of what a person on a bicycle is when you’re biking for transit,” Adair tells The Frisc.
Hoboken, which is part of a dense, interconnected network of towns — much like the East Bay and Oakland, where Adair grew up and began biking — has benefited from coordination at the county level. Adair sits on the board of the nonprofit Hudson County Complete Streets, which advocates for street changes in Hoboken and neighboring communities. “We are all connected with a county road that has a protected bike lane, so it behooves our city to have that same infrastructure,” she notes.
The Frisc caught up with Adair recently to discuss Hoboken’s success, the importance of advocacy, and how a little civic pride (or jealousy) doesn’t hurt, either.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Frisc: What’s one key development that helped Hoboken eliminate traffic deaths?
Chris Adair: In the last decade we’ve had mayors that were in tune with street safety. Dawn Zimmer modeled bike commuting when she served, so she came from a biking-to-work perspective. Our current mayor Ravi Bhalia has implemented a lot of safe street policies like daylighting intersections. Our department of transportation and city council are also on board with safety measures.
One issue in SF is enforcement of traffic laws. What does enforcement look like in Hoboken?
Enforcement can play a role, but we think of that as secondary because we don’t want to see people getting targeted. Also, people chime in that cyclists and pedestrians break rules, too. But their rule-bending doesn’t have the same ramifications that a car does when it runs a stop sign or something. Making people understand that difference is challenging.
Our instinct is to place blame on individuals, but safety issues arise from the way the road is set up.
So it’s a focus on infrastructure. How do you make the case for these changes?
I’m thinking of a county road we want to see narrowed, but we get complaints from drivers that traffic would be too slow. We make the case that the most important thing isn’t how fast cars can travel.
If a trip is slowed by a minute or two, that should be an acceptable tradeoff if the change keeps pedestrians or cyclists safer. Infrastructure is the way to navigate change in behavior — to force drivers to slow down.
You have neighboring communities that may have different priorities for their streets. How do you get other cities on board?
We have lots of county streets in Hoboken — they’re where our high-injury corridors are — as well as state roads. Jersey City [just south of Hoboken], which is more similar to San Francisco in terms of size, and Hoboken have done a phenomenal job working together to put in more protected bike lanes.
Advocacy groups in the various cities are friendly and competitive. For instance, we can point to something Jersey City is doing — and vice-versa — to see if we can match them or do better.
Hoboken has gotten a lot of recognition, and that’s put other cities under pressure. They see all this good press and say, “We want some of that, too.” I think Weehawken [just north of Hoboken] has more bike lanes now, and they’re adhering more to state law where you can’t park within 25 feet of a crosswalk.
SF officials complain about the state working against them. How does the state government in Trenton work with or against Hoboken and other cities on street safety?
I’d say the state doesn’t work in the best interests of cities on safety issues, despite having adopted Vision Zero statewide. The Turnpike Authority has wanted to expand the New Jersey Turnpike, which runs through Hudson County. There are other entities like the Port Authority, which runs all the tunnels. All have an interest in keeping people in cars. We don’t want to add another set of lanes to squeeze even more traffic through the Holland Tunnel [which connects to Manhattan]. It will just push more traffic to our city streets.
Do you ever come back to the Bay Area?
Yes. My father still lives in Oakland.
So you’re familiar with street safety issues here. What advice would you have to make streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists?
Where I grew up in Oakland, around Park Boulevard, the city has done a road diet there [removing a traffic lane]. My father said people used to speed down that street all the time. I used to do that too. Now you can’t — it’s so much better, so much safer. And you’re not losing any time. These things really work.
I’d say you need to make sure your elected officials know you favor these safety measures and vote for those who support them. Organizing is also key. It can be lonely speaking just for yourself. I found it’s nice to have a group working together for changes.
Kristi Coale covers streets, transit, the environment, and more for The Frisc.