Alas, Vienna is no utopia. But Philly is eight times deadlier.

I know what you’re expecting from this one, since every other Instagram post targeted for folks that like walking and trains labels Vienna “the one that got away”. Vienna is the promised land, the Christ to the US’s anti-Christ. It’s what happens when a city finally loves you back.

Surely, any minute now I’m going to describe a tram gliding past a bakery while a child cycles to school through a sunbeam. Free furnished apartments for all, and to all a good night.

Here’s the actual takeaway from paradise: the cars are loud here too.

For the new folks: this newsletter’s whole thing is that driving in Philly sucks because we’ve built a city where too many people have no other option, and that the fix is options, not lectures.

So, what makes Vienna like Philly? Vienna has traffic. Vienna has motorcycles, cars, and road noise. Vienna has drivers that pump up the jam, pump it up, while their feet are stomping (on the gas pedal). Just because the noise bounces off affordable apartments and plentiful parks doesn’t mean it sounds any different than it does bouncing off a rowhome on Snyder.

And the diesel! Nearly half the cars in this country run on diesel, and you can smell it. In Philly, diesel’s mostly delivery trucks and school buses (which is insane in its own right). Here, it’s every box of metal on four wheels that hasn’t gone electric yet. Bonus lesson, free of charge: diesel stinks.

Counterpoint: no F-150s, F-250s, Rams, or Mustangs that I’ve seen. So, more diesel, but admittedly less under-combusted gasoline pouring out the back of an idling symbol of overkill.

Oh, and the big one. Vienna, the city on every urbanist vision board, is about to spend 2.7 billion euro building a highway tunnel under a UNESCO-protected wetland. Not through some neglected industrial corridor: under a national park. Preparatory work on the first stage starts this year. Activists fought it for decades and the courts are still chewing on it, but people sure do love their expressways.

In their defense, at least it’s not through the city like 95, 76, or 676.

But no, I have not ascended. There is no city where the work is finished. If you’re waiting to find the place where the deed is done, stop looking because it doesn’t exist.

Gripes and smells aside, Vienna has numbers to back up the work they have done.

In 2024, 20 people were killed by traffic violence in Vienna. In the same year, 125 people were killed in Philadelphia.

With Vienna at about two million residents and Philly at 1.5 million, Vienna’s bigger by a Pittsburgh, but it killed one sixth the people.

If you do the per-resident math, Philly comes out around eight times deadlier. If Philly had the magic sauce of Vienna, we’d have been at 15 people killed by traffic violence in 2024. Not 125. Fifteen. That’s 110 of our neighbors, every single year, who are only dead because they crossed the street in the wrong city.

May I be the first to say: wahwahweewah.

It gets more absurd. Three entire Vienna districts (Wieden, Neubau, Hietzing) went seven consecutive years without a single traffic death. Seven years and zero deaths. These are neighborhoods the size of Fishtown or Point Breeze, with cars, trucks, delivery vans, and tourists who don’t know where they’re going. Imagine South Philly going 2018 through 2024 without one person killed on its streets. Imagine even one year.

Oh and when Vienna’s number went from 12 to 20, it was a scandal. Local press ran it as a crisis. Twenty deaths, in a city of two million, and the reaction was “what is going wrong here?”

Philly hit 100 in 2025, which was a 16% improvement, but we just took the win. One hundred funerals, presented as progress. Vienna’s worst year in recent memory is a number Philly literally cannot imagine, and they treated it like a five-alarm fire.

For context, Vienna was at its height in 1990 with 86 deaths. 86 is, notably, less than 100. Almost 40 years ago.

That’s the lesson: people, politicians, policymakers actually gave a shit and made a change.

Unless you consider lead’s impact on city-wide behavior, Vienna’s success isn’t some great coincidence.

The Viennese are not better people. They jaywalk, they lean on their horns (less than Philadelphians), they are weirdly ranked the least friendly city on earth. The difference is that this city baked the boring safety stuff into the code a long time ago.

You only start to get progress when you make the rule change. Then you have to wait the 25 years for all the roads to be repaved and reimplemented with those improvements.

So if we make the rule change now, we still have to wait a few decades. (Hint, hint, Mayor Parker, hint.)

The transit pass here had cost 365 euro a year (a euro a day) for thirteen straight years, and just went up for the first time since 2012, to 467. For that you get a network so frequent that not owning a car is the default setting. You don’t have to plan trips, you just show up at the station and in less than five minutes, your train, tram, or bus takes you on your way.

And in parallel, the streets are built on the assumption that humans make mistakes, but prioritizes the people most at risk: raised crossings, daylighted corners, transit islands, bollards standing around in broad daylight like it’s legal, which, here, it is.

None of this is particularly novel. This is the same boring, proven stuff I’ve been pointing out, the stuff Philly funds at $3.22 per resident per year. We even have our own proof that it works: the Roosevelt Boulevard cameras cut speeding by 95% without needing to take up smoking or start making your own apple strudel.

For real though, Philly Streets Dept: tell me why a city traced back about two thousand years is able to do raised crosswalks, where you tell us that you can’t because “grade and drainage”?

And before the various flavors of “Vienna is a dense old European city, my guy. Philly isn’t Europe.” Friend, I have news. Philly is the most European city America has: a compact, flat, rowhouse city with a grid, a subway, trolleys we’ve been neglecting since Eisenhower, and neighborhoods built before the car.

We keep getting “Most Walkable City” in spite of ourselves. We are not Houston. The bones are already here. Vienna didn’t get its numbers from the palaces. It got them from paint, concrete, cameras, and a government that decided 20 dead people was a problem worth fixing.

I didn’t move to paradise. I moved to a loud, diesel-scented, highway-building city that argues about parking exactly like we do (without killing each other over it), yet almost no one gets run over here.

The fact that it’s not a utopia should make you angrier. Perfection is not on the menu, fine. But “eight times fewer dead neighbors” actually is, and it’s available to any city willing to put the policies on the book and start building.

Send this to the person who told you it can’t work in Philly. Then ask your council member why Vienna’s worst year since 2017 would be the best year in Philadelphia’s modern history.

I’ll keep the reports coming, with diesel commentary on the side.

Let’s make driving suck less.