Vision Zero Is Failing in 8 of 17 US Cities That Adopted It. Here’s the Data
A 7-year analysis of federal fatal-crash records — NYC, the first major American city to pledge zero traffic deaths, has seen truck fatalities rise 13%.
Vision Zero arrived in the United States as a borrowed promise. The slogan, lifted from Sweden’s 1997 road-safety doctrine, said something simple and morally clear: no traffic death is acceptable, and street design should reflect that.
Twelve American cities formally signed up to the framework between 2012 and 2017. Five more followed by 2020. They redrew arterials, lowered default speeds, painted bike lanes, banned truck routes near schools, installed automated enforcement cameras. The political commitment, almost everywhere, came with public targets and a deadline.
We pulled seven years of federal fatal-crash data — NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) — across 19 major US cities, 2018 through 2024, and asked a simple question: did the Vision Zero cities actually cut truck-involved deaths?
The answer is uncomfortable.
Of 17 cities that adopted Vision Zero, 10 cut truck-involved fatalities from a 2018–2019 baseline to a 2023–2024 average. 8 did not. The dividing line had little to do with which year a city signed up, how big the city was, or how progressive its transportation department.
And New York City — the first major American city to adopt Vision Zero, in 2014 — saw truck deaths rise 13.1% over the period, despite more than a decade of street redesigns.
The full ranked table and per-city sparklines live here: Vision Zero Report Card 2026.
What the data shows
We restricted the analysis to medium and heavy commercial trucks — FARS body-type codes 60–69 — which excludes passenger pickups under 10,000 pounds. That’s the standard NHTSA and IIHS truck-crash definition. We summed fatalities per city per year, then compared each city’s 2018–2019 baseline average to its 2023–2024 recent average.
The cities that improved span a wide range of geographies and political colors:
- Miami (–50%)
- Atlanta (–50%)
- Portland (–40%)
- Austin (–35%)
- Washington DC (–33%)
- San Diego (–25%)
- Chicago (–21%)
- Boston (–20%)
- Jacksonville (–12%) — non-adopter
- San Antonio (–7%)
- Nashville (–6%)
The cities where truck deaths rose are equally varied:
- NYC (+13%) — Vision Zero adopter since 2014
- Dallas (+24%)
- Phoenix (+26%)
- Denver (+30%)
- Houston (+38%) — non-adopter
- Los Angeles (+38%) — Vision Zero adopter since 2015
- Philadelphia (+100%) — small sample caveat
- Seattle (+200%) — small sample caveat
Two cities on the “losers” list — Seattle and Philadelphia — trade in single-digit annual fatality counts where percentage swings reflect statistical noise as much as policy outcome. Their rankings should be treated as suggestive, not definitive.
Get Marvin Bregiosa’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But the rest are real. Los Angeles, with a Vision Zero pledge since 2015 and a “zero deaths by 2025” target, saw truck deaths climb 38%. Houston, which never signed up, has roughly the same rate of decline (actually slightly worse).
The simplest reading: Vision Zero adoption alone does not predict outcomes.
Why the framework isn’t doing what it promises
Vision Zero is not a single policy. It’s a political commitment with a long menu of possible interventions: protected bike infrastructure, lower default speeds, automated speed-camera enforcement, designated freight corridors, daylighting at intersections, leading pedestrian intervals, road diets, daylit crosswalks.
Each city’s adoption looks different. The cities that succeeded — Portland, Austin, Chicago — generally combined aggressive speed-limit changes with bike-infrastructure buildout and freight-route reform. The cities that didn’t — LA, Phoenix, Denver — added line items to transportation department budgets, often without binding implementation deadlines, and let political opposition to street redesign water down the original commitments.
NYC is the most interesting case. It has more Vision Zero infrastructure than any other US city, real political will under both de Blasio and Adams administrations, and the largest dedicated traffic-safety budget. Total traffic deaths (all modes) hit a record low in 2019 — Vision Zero was working. But truck fatalities specifically have been rising since 2020, driven by a surge in last-mile delivery growth (Amazon, FedEx, USPS, regional grocery), a shortage of overnight loading zones forcing illegal double-parking, and the structural reality that commercial trucks are exempt from many speed-reduction interventions because they share federally-designated truck routes that bypass local rules.
The takeaway: Vision Zero infrastructure helps pedestrians and cyclists hit by passenger cars. It does much less for people hit by trucks, which is a different problem with different causes, and the framework’s brand success has crowded out the freight-specific conversations that would actually move truck-fatality numbers.
What this means for the next decade
We’re at the tail end of the first Vision Zero generation. The cities that pledged in 2014–2016 are now seven to ten years in, with public-facing deadlines passing without the promised results. Some cities are reupping their commitments quietly; others are publicly walking them back; LA’s “zero by 2025” is now openly unattainable.
What the data suggests is not that Vision Zero is wrong. It’s that the framework was always primarily a passenger-vehicle reform program, and pretending otherwise — by counting trucks in headline targets without freight-specific interventions — sets cities up to miss their numbers and lose political capital for the next round.
The cities that improved most for truck deaths specifically (Portland, Austin, Chicago) did freight-specific work: lower truck-route speed limits, mandatory side-underride guards on city-contracted fleets, banned heavy trucks from residential side-streets, signal timing optimized for cargo vehicles.
The cities that didn’t — they did Vision Zero broadly, expected truck deaths to follow.
They didn’t.
How we built this
The published report at accidentlawyerreview.com/research/vision-zero-report-card has an interactive sortable table, per-city sparklines, full methodology, and downloads for the structured JSON, the row-level CSV (33,898 crashes), and the Python script that produces the analysis from raw NHTSA zips.
Source code on GitHub. Filtered dataset also mirrored on HuggingFace. Everything is CC BY 4.0 — free to republish with attribution.
If you cover urban policy, transportation safety, or city government — feel free to slice this however helps your beat. There’s a per-city slice waiting for every reporter who wants one; email is in the footer of the published report.
AccidentLawyerReview is an independent public-data directory of US personal-injury law firms. This report is part of our Crash Atlas series. We are not a law firm and do not provide legal advice.
