Is Zero Reasonable? A Multidisciplinary Framing of Traffic Deaths

"Zero traffic deaths" sounds like one question. It's actually three: a forecast (will it happen?), an engineering target (can it happen?), and a moral commitment (should we treat it as the goal?). Public health, economics, and ethics give genuinely different answers to each. The confusion between them is most of why the policy debate goes nowhere.

"Zero traffic deaths" sounds like one question. It's actually three: a forecast, an engineering target, and a moral commitment. Mixing them up is most of why the policy debate goes nowhere.

"Zero traffic deaths" sounds like one question. It's actually three: a forecast (will it happen?), an engineering target (can it happen?), and a moral commitment (should we treat it as the goal?). Public health, economics, and ethics give genuinely different answers, and most of the policy debate is people arguing past each other because they're not answering the same question.

"Is zero traffic deaths reasonable?" feels like a single question. It isn't. Buried inside it are a forecast, an engineering target, and a moral commitment, and they don't have the same answer. A public health framing looks at what interventions move the number. An economics framing asks what tradeoff society is actually making. An ethics framing asks whether any nonzero number is acceptable at all. Most of the Vision Zero debate is people confidently answering one of those while assuming they're answering all three.

"Zero traffic deaths" is three questions dressed as one: a forecast, an engineering target, and a moral commitment. Public health, economics, and ethics answer them differently. Most of the policy debate is people talking past each other because of that.

"Zero traffic deaths" sounds like one question. It's actually three: a forecast, an engineering target, and a moral commitment. Most of the Vision Zero debate is people answering one while assuming they're answering all three.