Vision Bla-zero

It ended, too, in typical de Blasio fashion. Vision Zero, the grandiose program he established in 2014, died on the rocks of some forgotten shore. Cause of death: neglect by manager.

Not, however, if you ask the mayor. Like so many other problems that plague de Blasio’s New York — from soaring homicide rates and plummeting arrest levels to chaos in the jails and falling school attendance — it is Covid’s fault.

“All of that,” de Blasio claimed last week, “is because Covid set a whole series of things in motion.”

There are few worse feelings than having a loved one leave the house and not return — the victim of an errant driver. Vision Zero aimed to cut traffic fatalities down to zero through a mix of targeting deadly roads, placing sidewalks in middle of boulevards, aggressive ticketing, and hoisting speed cameras near intersections. In Sweden, where the parliament introduced a similar program in 1997, traffic deaths went down from 541 that year to 273 in 2019.