What a terrible article. Spends half the time talking about how important it is to use data and not take a simplistic view of the issue, and the other half ignoring data and dismissing things based on a simplistic (if not strawman) view.

> That means 25 percent of the value of roads and streets is due to their ability to move freight. Yet freight is hardly considered by planners when designing their regional transportation plans. Mindless slowing of traffic by, say, 20 percent increases costs to freight companies by forcing them to buy 20 percent more trucks and hire 20 percent more drivers.

I couldn’t find anyone trying to “mindlessly slow traffic”. So this is acting as if all roads are equally used for moving freight, which they aren’t. Slowing roads with a high amount of pedestrian/car interactions doesn’t necessarily effect freight movement from industrial areas onto highways and larger arterial roads.

> vision zero is based the simplistic idea that, “people hit by fast cars are more likely to die than people hit by slow cars, so therefore slowing down traffic is the sole measure to be taken to improve safety.” Cities such as Portland have been implementing this idea for several decades, and the increase in traffic fatalities in those cities proves that it doesn’t work.

See here for an article about the data used by Vision Zero [1] and judge for yourself if it is portrayed accurately in this article. Then there is just throwing out the assertion that Portland has more traffic fatalities, therefore measures didn’t work. Did Portland increase in population over that time period? Did the actual rates go up, or just absolute numbers? Dismissing based on a single data point doesn't sound data-driven. Datum-driven, maybe.

> Safer transit means buses, not rail lines. Buses have been involved with the fewest fatalities, per billion passenger-miles, of any of the major modes of transit. Buses are also less expensive than any rail mode. Proponents of rail transit, particularly light rail and streetcars, clearly are uninterested in improving urban safety.

Again, blanket statement based on literally 1 data point. Never looks at light rail that moves people into and out of a city (hub and spoke) vs intracity light rail. Never looks at raised track vs on street. Has no interest in actual data.

> Americans are not dependent on autos: they are liberated by them, enjoying far greater mobility than anyone else, anywhere else, in the entire history of humanity. That mobility has made us wealthy and given us access to, among other things, better health care.

Yeah, citation needed. As someone who has traveled outside the US, I have seen plenty of cities where high quality public transit felt pretty liberating and mobile, and plenty of American cities where if you didn’t rent a car, you were trapped. Also, healthcare? You're really going to hang our hat on the US healthcare system?

> While programs such as complete streets call for greater mixing of bicycles, pedestrians, and motor vehicles, safety can be better improved by separating uses.

This feels deliberately false, since Complete Streets does call for separating uses, but it depends on the actual context of the situation as to what measures would work best [2].

> much of the increase in fatalities since 2014 was among pedestrians, and most of the increase in pedestrian fatalities took place at night and involved pedestrians engaging in unsafe behavior such as jaywalking. Some say this is blaming the victim, but it is important to understand the problem before trying to fix it. Most of the remedies offered by urban planners—such as traffic calming, complete streets, and vision zero—don’t address the problem of unsafe pedestrian behavior.

Like a broken record, this seems deliberately false. The entire point of those programs are to make systems where safely moving through an area, whether it is as a pedestrian or car, is safer by default. It is baffling to me how they can specifically call out jaywalking, and then spend the rest of the article deriding programs that improve safely crossing the street. They are heavily implying that it is the individual pedestrians making the “wrong” choice, instead of a system designed to provide a safe and convenient option that makes safety the default. Sounds like the opposite of data driven.