I wrote a blog post about my learnings there - "Engineering over enforcement":
> Enforcement philosophy is rooted in the idea that behavior can be controlled by threatening punishments. Engineering philosophy believes that infrastructure can be designed to incentivize desired behavior. When Oslo sought to reduce pedestrian deaths, it turned to engineers.
> [ . . .] Intersections are one small example where philosophies can diverge. But, as I learned in Oslo, engineers have a whole toolkit of methods to make cities safer. Bumping out a curb slows down turning speeds and protects pedestrians. Bike lanes can be safer by being raised above the street instead of relying on a painted barrier. Limiting how far cars can see ahead of them slows them down. Behavior can be designed rather than just enforced, and in aggregate these small changes can make a city safer.
Alternatively, greenhouse-gas bumps.
Dunno which genius in my town put them on a road riddled with potholes, poorly filled road cuts and marsh-related unevenness.
They added some square-like flower pots in the middle of a lovely road next to where I live in order to force drivers to make a double S turn. Those are made from sharp rust-painted steel, and most of the corners are now painted with other peoples car paint. The only way to make it through is to drive at walking speed, which basically everyone do.
https://www.jalopnik.com/these-speed-bumps-only-turn-solid-i...
Probably highly temperature dependent or get stabbed with a knife in 2.3 hours depleting its reserve of non-newtonian goo.
Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.
Bullbars used to be a trend in the UK, for example, until they were band in the late 90s/early 00s because they were fatal to pedestrians.
The reasons for that are not clear, and urbanists obviously are afraid to investigate it. For fear of being branded "car-brain" and denied the cushy positions. I have a suspicion that in the US the destruction of city streets just _encourages_ reckless behavior from drivers.
Probably it comes down to culture. Finns and Norwegians are just generally more law-abiding.
Do you have a link handy for this?
Since it started in 2015, accidents are down 50%, but deaths up 90%. This analysis leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't see per-capita stats (Seattle had massive growth during a lot of those years), and we don't really enforce traffic laws at all anyway, so IDK what to think without digging in further.
As a visitor (periodically throughout the whole timespan) it's seemed to me like there's massive growth in population in the metro area and more densification inside the Seattle downtown area. Tough to tell what geography this exactly captures. Assuming the numbers are valid, I do wonder if there's a significant demographic or exurb shift, where older drivers became a higher proportion of all drivers where they already lived, and a bunch of others either stopped entirely or moved outside the city boundaries.
If memory serves, I feel like there's also a tendency to accidentally end up committed to a toll bridge crossing by getting stuck on an exit/on ramp off one of the highways, which might make people panic and bail at the last second erratically, but that idea seems a bit farfetched
The interesting question is power-to-weight, which was (apparently) a direct result of EPA regulations that were enacted in 1975. The below article, which I found from a search engine copying your question and looking at a few results, is an interesting read.
Ignoring all that, the actual question would be: how have car sizes and weights changed _in this region_ during this period of time. Sizes and weights of cars in brasil have little bearing to accidents in the PNW, for example.
https://carbuzz.com/new-vehicles-bigger-heavier-more-powerfu...
This article has SF pedestrian deaths by year: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2026/pedestrian-fatalit...
For Portland you need to check their police news archives, I couldn't find a dashboard. Here are the data from 2016 and 2024: https://www.portland.gov/transportation/vision-zero/document... (13 pedestrian deaths), https://www.portland.gov/transportation/vision-zero/document... (22 pedestrian deaths). The population growth was 9% between 2016 and 2024.
I don't have an explanation for these increases, and there are no good papers that explore this in depth. I need to write a meta-research paper: "On the lack of research on urbanism-related policy failures".
Enforcement didn't work because people won't follow the law anyway or engineering didn't work because people tried to drive through the obstacles or approach them with the same speed and smashed/smooshed more?
Those seem like harder challenges then the changes themselves.
People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently, and as a result I think are unfortunately immune to a lot of the subtle forces that generally help to improve safety in other civilized societies.
P.S.
As for the absurd response, the assertion was
> People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently
and a handwaving reference to an intercity train system from someone who can't even be bothered to make any sort of argument does not establish the point.
Considering American involved Wars: American Civil War, Vietnam War, First Gulf War, Iraq War, World War 2
Considering how many millions have died due to unrestrained capitalism destroying ecosystem, contaminating air, water, soil?
Please do not pretend that capitalism does not promote nor allow the deaths of those who it is profitable to allow to die.
Getting hit by a pickup or high profile SUV is much more likely to kill you than a compact.
Adding bull bars to the front virtually guarantees a fatal head injury to a child.
I'd love for my city to just focus on making other forms of transportation more appealing. More bus lanes, more (properly designed) bike lanes, etc.
This is despite a relatively small (but real) reduction in casualty figures that came with the change.
https://openresearch.amsterdam/nl/page/124453/onderzoeksrapp...
Personally, I have driven around the Netherlands a fair bit and this sort of thing does seem to be roughly true for the median case. It can definitely be annoying when the streets are empty, though. For those journeys you’re obviously losing a fair bit of time.
They're self flagellating because they can't just come out and say what "those people off in Iowa, yeah, well F them" or something along those lines.
If you try and drive somewhere unfamiliar here you are pretty much guaranteed to get some sort of ticket as half the roads are one way, and you can't turn into the other half for random reasons.
Oh, most left hand red arrows in the city, start red when the main light goes green, and they have cameras on them too. You can literally see the camera lights flashing non stop when you walk along.
Add to this, zero rules for pedestrians, no one waits for the lights if they can see a break in the traffic.
Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736025 - July 2025 (652 comments)
By very narrow definitions of win. Perhaps more time in transit is worth fewer deaths and less pollution. (I rode a bike daily and year round in northern Ohio for 8y.)
> If you can’t make fast driving safer you haven’t achieved anything really.
By what measure of achievement? Zero traffic deaths in a heavily populated city is quite an accomplishment IMO. But I'm not a racecar driver so maybe I'm unqualified to judge.
Seattle, Portland, SF enshittified their roads, limited the traffic speed, choked the streets with bike lanes, drank all the KoolAid.
Yet the deaths _increased_.
Narrowing lanes creates new hazards because cars sold are only getting larger and can barely fit. There is too often no margin for error.
There are no roadworthiness inspections in these states. Many people are driving on worn tires and suspensions. Most people don't even know what types of tires they have or what the tire pressures are.
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.
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.
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.
So now you have a road where the speed limit used to be 35, but is large and straight enough to comfortably go 45, with a speed limit of 25. That causes people to go wildly different speeds and (in my opinion) makes it a lot more dangerous.
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.
If speediots followed the rules, there wouldn't be a speed differential. You're blaming the rule followers, when in fact it is the people with the patience of a toddler causing the speed differential.
Driving is, in most cases, the only life-and-death activity you undertake during your day, and if you don't have the emotional capacity to handle not being where you want instantly, you don't have the emotional capacity to handle a machine that can kill other people.
But, they don’t. So there is a speed differential. That’s reality, you aren’t going to change that unless you start executing people that speed, and that isn’t a realistic solution.
Redesigning the road so people instinctively drive slower does actually work. You take a four lane road, and change it to a two-lane road with left turn lanes, concrete medians that make the road appear narrower, concrete aprons that jut out into the road at crosswalks to make it appear even narrower, wider medians, and so on. The two major roads in my neighborhood have been redesigned this way and the results have been great, if a road is properly designed for a specific speed, you can actually get people to drive slower. It works on me, and I know the tricks.
What you’re arguing for is akin to operating industrial machinery without safeties, relying on unreliable humans to moderate their behavior, when you could prevent it by designing the road so that even speeders drive the speed limit or slightly over.
I’ve seen redesigning roads actually work, you can be dismissive and pray that people will magically follow the rules, but that won’t make it so.
This is an adult conversation, please think before you type absurdities like this.
If (A) there was enough enforcement to actually catch people that speed, and (B) the punishment was rehabilitative (you have to clean up the roadway you were endangering people's lives on and take a class to retest for your license) there would be far fewer speeders.
> What you’re arguing for is akin to operating industrial machinery without safeties
No, actually, I'd love if we redesigned roads so people instinctively drive slower. I'm not arguing against that in any way.
All my post was doing was insisting that if you're going to blame someone, you place blame where it belongs. You're blaming people doing what they should be doing instead of the people endangering everyone around them.
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.
The article talks about using design and engineering out of the problem. I do not believe that is what was done in the cities you cite, even if that was their headline intention.
> "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.
Focusing on the metrics you want to focus on, does not make the data unambiguous. eg This analysis has not accounted for cohort sizing. Are there more or less pedestrians? What is the average distance? How many bicyclists? et al.
Why shouldn't I look at the metric it's supposed to improve?
> Are there more or less pedestrians? What is the average distance? How many bicyclists? et al.
So you're saying that we should sacrifice pedestrians so that people can bike?