Safety Theater

Vision Zero is a good concept, and the right way to think about street safety as a policy approach. But, as author Eric Ries points out in "Lean Startup", it's very easy to get caught up in "vanity metrics" and "success theater" rather than making real progress. 

What do I mean when I title this blog "Success Theater"?  Well, success theater is when you have PR and management slides that make it seem like your ballyhooed new initiative is yielding results when actually it's just spending money. We all have some experience with this -- "more light, less noise", "don't talk the talk if you can't walk the walk", "all talk, no action", "all hat, no cattle" and all the other corporate and political aphorisms for situations where it is clear that the reality and the press do not align. 

As for vanity metrics, they are the quantitative underpinnings of success theater. Maybe it's hard, or uncomfortable, to track the real thing your new policy and approach are intended to accomplish, so instead you find proxy metrics that supposedly show the same thing, except maybe instead they simply track how hard you're working on it. After all, you can't expect immediate results, right? And, if over time the "real" results make inconvenient intrusions into the news, you can simply ask for more money and do more work! By all means, gather statistics and let data talk, but understand WHY they are being gathered, and ensure that you get visibility into the real, end-goal information. 

Within any "mature" corporate or government system, the career employees and managers will tend toward success theater and embrace vanity metrics because that's the way to have a long, successful career: measurable goals that show real progress on really hard problems will tend to exhibit problems, delays, and sometimes outright failures. You can always have success in showing hard work, outreach meetings, quarterly initiatives, and working group publications. In a company, a good executive will eventually call B.S. on unproductive work that fails to resolve real issues, so if (and it is an IF) safety is actually important to a company, meaning that it impacts the bottom line, then a structure will grow that rewards real metrics. We need this accountability for our government entities as well, which means we need to deliberately align individual success with achievement of the societal goals. 

The appropriate way of thinking is to consider safety to be EVERYBODY's responsibility, from the highest-ranking to the low-level on-the-streets people, and with goals and tracking statistics that keep the thinking aligned.  If the goal is a safer, healthier populace, we should count crashes, deaths, injuries, heart attacks, flu cases, and overall health statistics of various sorts, and make those the criteria for awarding bonuses/raises/promotions for the civil servants involved. Yes, street safety is one part of overall wellness, and so is crime, and health/epidemiology, and exercise levels and diet. 

But we've mostly been talking about street safety, and so deaths, injuries, crash damage, near-misses, and hazard conditions all contribute.  Sure, you can also collect traffic counts, congestion delays, and miles of new paths, commuting patterns, and trip modality, and use that data when they make sense. Be careful about metrics like budget allocations in terms of percent spent on biking infrastructure and sidewalk repairs, or miles of new lanes added, or new miles of bike lanes, as these are necessary but not sufficient to make progress. For any widely published and oft-reviewed information, make sure it is in service to real metrics for real goals, and not just vanity metrics for success theater.