safety over speed Archives - Transportation For America

Three ways quick builds can speed up safety

It will take years to unwind decades of dangerous street designs that have helped contribute to a 40-year high in pedestrian deaths, but quick-build demonstration projects can make a concrete difference overnight. Every state, county, and city that wants to prioritize safety first should be deploying them.

Quick-build demonstration projects are temporary installations to test new street design improvements that improve safety and accessibility. Here are three reasons why you, your elected leaders, and your transportation agency should have them as a tool in your arsenal:

1. Improve safety quickly in the most dangerous places

If elected leaders or transportation agencies are truly committed to safety, they must consider ways to improve immediately.

Transportation in this country often moves at a snail’s pace. Between planning, community engagement, and construction, adding safe infrastructure can take years. But that can leave dangerous conditions unchanged for far too long. If the number one goal is safety, and we know where the most dangerous places are, then we should be doing everything possible to fix them as quickly as possible.

As opposed to the years required for many capital projects, quick builds can go up in a matter of a week, addressing pressing issues immediately. While we should plan long-term safety projects, making safety the number one priority means doing everything we can to implement change in the meantime.

2. Cheaply test specific designs, interventions, and materials

Transportation departments are rightfully worried about building things that will be in place for the next 30 years. It’s hard to move concrete once it’s poured. That is precisely why quick builds need to be used more.

While permanent changes to infrastructure may need years to plan, temporary measures that use paint and plastic don’t require the same level of deliberation. A quick build can test out possible designs using building materials that transportation departments already have on hand. The beauty of this is that it allows you to test a concept in real life (at very low cost), get feedback, and make it better. Quick builds can be iterated upon and provide data inputs for future, permanent projects.

Quick builds can also help foster vital partnerships between local transportation departments and state DOTs. The deadliest roads are owned by the states, with 54 percent of pedestrian deaths taking place on these roads. If localities want to design roads for safety and economic activity while a state DOT wants to move cars as quickly as possible, this can lead to friction. Quick builds allow these stakeholders to learn how to work with each other. Smart Growth America’s Complete Streets Leadership Academies put this idea into action in multiple states.

3. Build needed trust for stronger permanent projects

Building highways through neighborhoods and continually ignoring communities has led to a situation in which low-income and minority groups are disproportionately harmed by traffic violence. It takes years to build up trust in places that have been disregarded. Quick builds can help the process of restoring relationships by demonstrating the responsiveness of local agencies, showing that change is possible. If someone is killed in an intersection, swiftly changing the intersection means much more in comparison to filing a potential improvement away in a list of projects years from implementation.

How federal leaders can help

State DOTs look to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) for guidance. FHWA has communicated that quick builds are allowed on state-owned roads, but that’s about as far as it goes—leaving state DOTs to do the heavy lifting on figuring out how to implement one in their state. This piecemeal approach means progress can be slow as each state works alone to discover best practices. To help make more quick builds a reality, the FHWA can provide a proactive guide to quick builds on state-owned roads and run training sessions for state DOT employees and FHWA regional offices.

So much of our transportation policy is based on a reactive response to issues. We wait for someone to get killed on a road, the community speaks out, and then the department of transportation (sometimes) acts. Quick-build demonstration projects are excellent ways to change road design today and are an important tool to finally prioritize speed over safety, but the work can’t end there. Quick builds are just the first step in building a safe transportation system. They are templates for a permanent, future change where safety is prioritized over speed.

It’s Safety Over Speed Week

Click below to access more content related to our first principle for infrastructure investment, Design for safety over speed. Find all three of our principles here.

Three ways quick builds can speed up safety

It will take years to unwind decades of dangerous street designs that have helped contribute to a 40-year high in pedestrian deaths, but quick-build demonstration projects can make a concrete difference overnight. Every state, county, and city that wants to prioritize safety first should be deploying them.
Why do most pedestrian deaths happen on state-owned roads?

Ask anyone at a state DOT, and they’ll tell you that safety is their top priority. Despite these good intentions, our streets keep getting more deadly. To reverse a decades-long trend of steadily increasing pedestrian deaths, state DOTs and federal leaders will need to fundamentally shift their approach away from speed.
Why we need to prioritize safety over speed

Our roads have never been deadlier for people walking, biking, and rolling and the federal government and state DOTs are not doing enough. If we want to fix this, we have to acknowledge the fact that our roads are dangerous and finally make safety a real priority for road design, not just a sound bite.

Why do most pedestrian deaths happen on state-owned roads?

A young man and woman attempt to cross the street on a worn out crosswalk while two cars approach

Ask anyone at a state department of transportation, and they’ll tell you that safety is their top priority. Despite these good intentions, our streets keep getting more deadly. To reverse a decades-long trend of steadily increasing pedestrian deaths, state DOTs and federal leaders will need to fundamentally shift their approach away from speed.

7,522 people were struck and killed while walking in 2022, an average of more than 20 deaths per day. These numbers represent the harsh reality many Americans see on a day-to-day basis: in most places across the U.S., there are few options to travel safely and comfortably outside of a vehicle. When that’s the case, a simple walk to school, work, or the grocery store can mean risking injury or death.

Some of the deadliest roads in the nation are state-owned—often wide, high-speed roadways that place an emphasis on vehicle travel, even as they cut through places where people frequently walk, bike, or roll. However, design changes on these deadly roadways often face pushback from state DOTs—even when those same DOTs claim that safety is their number one priority.

There is a logical disconnect between the way our leaders describe the goals of our roadways and the way our roadways are designed. Despite the stated goal of safety, engineers’ actual top priority is moving cars quickly—as evidenced by measures and models like value of time and level of service.

Years of research have shown that when roads are designed for vehicles to drive as quickly as possible, there are serious consequences for the safety of all other travelers. Yet the same design changes that would improve safety also come up against barrier after barrier to progress.

The change we need from state DOTs

The unfortunate reality is that our traffic engineers have been taught for decades that most problems can be solved with wide, high-speed lanes. Changing that thinking requires a real culture shift, starting at the very top. State DOTs require strong leadership and support to tailor projects to a well-defined problem and evaluate the outcomes of their decisions.

A willingness to rethink old models and reckon with the fact that the go-to solution hasn’t solved many of our transportation problems can go a long way in bringing about a safer travel environment. The good news is that alternative solutions are out there—if state DOTs are willing to give them a try. A select number of state DOTs have already started to implement change by, for example, navigating opportunities to utilize a Complete Streets approach on rural highways or trying out a quick-build demonstration project to boost engagement.

The typical approach to designing our roadways has left safety behind. We can’t curb the danger with more of the same. Going forward, state DOTs will need to think outside of the box to protect everyone traveling on their roads.

Our federal leaders have to be part of the solution

Guidance and regulations from USDOT often set standards that prioritize high-speed vehicle travel, but these same regulations also allow state DOTs to make safer choices if they wish. Unfortunately, practitioners at state DOTs don’t always seem to know they have this flexibility, and even if they are aware, they face additional barriers if they want to use it.

When state DOTs use extra time and effort to overcome these barriers and test out a new safety feature, this gets no notice from the federal government—even if it results in improved safety. In fact, if a state DOT does nothing and allows more people to die on their roadways, that DOT receives the same level of funding and attention as those making effective safety improvements. This creates a system where it is far more practical to maintain the deadly status quo than it is to implement proven safety methods.

Recently, our colleagues at Smart Growth America wrapped up a series of technical assistance projects to build partnerships between local communities and state DOTs and advance safety on state-owned roadways. T4A Director and VP of Transportation and Thriving Communities Beth Osborne reflected on the experience:

We’ve heard through our years of work, including most recently with participants in this program, that state DOT staff often feel left on their own to determine whether a non-traditional safety treatment they may like to try out is permitted by USDOT…even if it has a proven track record of improving safety. There is a great opportunity for federal leaders to work with states, local leaders, and safety and public health partners to foster and support more learning through demonstration projects with proactive new guidance.

For state DOTs to truly prioritize safety over speed, system-wide change is necessary—and they can’t do it alone. USDOT can help by providing affirmative guidance that promotes safety strategies that actually achieve results. Future legislation must also hold states accountable for choosing safety over speed.

It’s Safety Over Speed Week

Click below to access more content related to our first principle for infrastructure investment, Design for safety over speed. Find all three of our principles here.

Three ways quick builds can speed up safety

It will take years to unwind decades of dangerous street designs that have helped contribute to a 40-year high in pedestrian deaths, but quick-build demonstration projects can make a concrete difference overnight. Every state, county, and city that wants to prioritize safety first should be deploying them.
Why do most pedestrian deaths happen on state-owned roads?

Ask anyone at a state DOT, and they’ll tell you that safety is their top priority. Despite these good intentions, our streets keep getting more deadly. To reverse a decades-long trend of steadily increasing pedestrian deaths, state DOTs and federal leaders will need to fundamentally shift their approach away from speed.
Why we need to prioritize safety over speed

Our roads have never been deadlier for people walking, biking, and rolling and the federal government and state DOTs are not doing enough. If we want to fix this, we have to acknowledge the fact that our roads are dangerous and finally make safety a real priority for road design, not just a sound bite.

Why we need to prioritize safety over speed

Principle #1: Safety over speed. Any serious effort to reduce deaths on our streets and roads requires slower speeds. Federal funding should require approaches and street designs that put safety first. Cartoon of the grim reaper tipping the scales towards pedestrian deaths while holding a speed limit: 55 sign.

Our roads have never been deadlier for people walking, biking, and rolling and the federal government and state DOTs are not doing enough. If we want to fix this, we have to acknowledge the fact that our roads are dangerous and finally make safety a real priority for road design, not just a sound bite.

Transportation in this country is fundamentally broken, creating a dangerous environment for everyone who uses it but especially for those outside of vehicles. The way we’ve built our roadways has transformed what should be easy trips into potentially deadly journeys. Though our cars have more safety features than ever—cameras, lane keep assist, automatic braking—those advancements have only served to protect people within vehicles. They didn’t save any of the 7,522 people killed while walking in 2022. In fact, as cars become safer for people inside the vehicle, they have gotten even larger and more deadly for people outside of them.

The fact of the matter is that fast-moving vehicles present a danger to people walking. We can’t address this danger if we are unwilling to commit to safer speeds.

We can’t do it all

The policies and practices that inform the design of our roadways often serve one primary goal: to move as many cars as possible, as quickly as possible. That negates the experience of everyone walking, biking, and rolling. Yet, if you asked the same people designing our roadways and dictating these policies whether safety is their top priority, they would absolutely say yes. Our approach to road design, reinforced by federal guidance and manuals, continually tries to juggle both speed and safety, when these two goals are fundamentally opposed.

When we try to prioritize both safety and speed, drivers end up receiving competing messages. Current roadway design requires people to drive perfectly while creating an environment that incentivizes risky behavior such as speeding. Safe roadways don’t ask people to slow down. They are designed so that safe speeds are the most intuitive option.

Less talk, more action

USDOT and other agencies have called for safer streets, but federal funding and policies haven’t led to results. This can be attributed to a variety of factors, including the relatively small amount of money set aside to specifically address safety compared to the much larger amount of money going to build even more dangerous roads.

State departments of transportation are allowed to set safety goals where more people die every year, knowing they will get more funding regardless. Meaningless “safety” targets allow governments to point their fingers and say they’re working on it while building even more deadly roads. The danger is often not addressed until multiple people get hurt. It’s no surprise that the majority of pedestrian deaths occur on federally funded, high-speed state roads.

There are not enough policies to support environments where safe mobility is available for all modes. The Surgeon General called to promote walking and walkable communities and to create a built environment that allows for human connection. The USDOT’s supposed top priority is safety and the Federal Highway Administration has a long-term goal of zero roadway deaths. But there’s no follow through on these statements. We want people to go on walks, and kids to play outside, and for there to be less deaths on the road, but our policies and tax dollars continue to primarily support projects that overlook non-vehicular traffic—at the expense of everyone else. Our transportation system is built on a series of hypocrisies.

If we want a system that moves people without killing them, we need to start putting our money where our mouths are. We need policies that put safety first, placing everyone’s well-being at the center of our roadway design.

It’s Safety Over Speed Week

Click below to access more content related to our first principle for infrastructure investment, Design for safety over speed. Find all three of our principles here.

Three ways quick builds can speed up safety

It will take years to unwind decades of dangerous street designs that have helped contribute to a 40-year high in pedestrian deaths, but quick-build demonstration projects can make a concrete difference overnight. Every state, county, and city that wants to prioritize safety first should be deploying them.
Why do most pedestrian deaths happen on state-owned roads?

Ask anyone at a state DOT, and they’ll tell you that safety is their top priority. Despite these good intentions, our streets keep getting more deadly. To reverse a decades-long trend of steadily increasing pedestrian deaths, state DOTs and federal leaders will need to fundamentally shift their approach away from speed.
Why we need to prioritize safety over speed

Our roads have never been deadlier for people walking, biking, and rolling and the federal government and state DOTs are not doing enough. If we want to fix this, we have to acknowledge the fact that our roads are dangerous and finally make safety a real priority for road design, not just a sound bite.

Three principles to guide federal transportation spending

T4A's three principles for transportation funding are Safety over Speed, Fix It First, and Invest in the Rest

It’s time for transportation investments that achieve results for all Americans. For future investments in U.S. infrastructure, Congress should follow three key principles: prioritize safety over speed, fix it first, and invest in the rest.

We’ve released our three principles for future federal investments in our nation’s infrastructure. Learn more about them at t4america.org/platform.

Federal transportation policy has very serious problems to solve. Our roads, bridges, transit, sidewalks, bikeways, and rail systems are in disrepair; congestion has increased; pedestrian fatalities and emissions are the highest in decades, and rising; and too many people lack safe, affordable, and convenient access to jobs and essential services.

For too long, Congress has thrown more funding at the problem, hoping that spending more dollars on the same thing will lead to different results. However, all this money has only continued to make our problems worse. As Congress makes decisions about limited taxpayer funds, it’s time that they invest smarter, prioritizing our dollars to create a transportation system that works for the average American.

With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expiring in 2026, the next surface transportation reauthorization, a significant federal investment in our nation’s infrastructure, will be top of mind for the next Congress. Based on the results of the last reauthorization (and the one before that, and the one before that), it is clear that we need a fundamental change in approach. That’s why we’re calling on Congress to update the decades-old federal transportation program to design for safety over speed, prioritize maintenance, and invest in the full transportation system, including opportunities to walk, bike, and take public transit.

Invest in the rest

For more than half a century, we’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars into building a sophisticated highway system that attempts to connect everyone to everything everywhere—by car. We’ve completed a highway system that was once the envy of the world, but now that same system is failing to meet today’s needs. Imagine what we could achieve if we applied the same level of funding and energy into investing in more options to get people where they need to go.

Past road projects destroyed walkable communities or eliminated walking as an option. Investments in highways have drastically outpaced transit investments, with roughly 80 percent of federal transportation money going to highways since the 1980s while only 20 percent has gone to public transportation. As a result, most Americans have to travel by car to get where they need to go—whether or not they want to or can afford to—which leads to more traffic, more lanes, and more harmful climate emissions.

It’s time for Congress to invest in the rest of our transportation system, which has been neglected for far too long, and bring the freedom of choice back to everyday Americans trying to get where they need to go as conveniently, safely, and affordably as possible.

It’s Invest in the Rest Week! In our next three posts, we’ll be diving into this principle and why it should be a top priority in federal transportation spending. Check out the first post here for more on this new T4A principle.

Safety over speed

Ask any member of Congress, and they’ll tell you that they believe our roads should be safe for all travelers. Yet federal investments in transportation have made our roads deadlier. In 2022, the number of people hit and killed while walking reached a 40-year high.

This is because our transportation models and policies prioritize the speed of vehicles over the safety of all road users. High-speed car travel makes sense in some environments, like on interstates or limited access highways. However, when fast-moving cars encounter people walking and biking on our local roadways, crashes, injuries, and deaths become far more likely. When it comes to roads like these, we have to choose between vehicle speed and the safety of all road users—we can’t have both.

Fix it first

There is an $830 billion backlog for repairing existing U.S. highways alone. The entire federal program spends about $50 billion per year, so even if we devoted 100 percent of all federal money to maintenance for ten straight years, we’d still be unable to fully address this backlog. This does not even account for the costs of maintaining and preserving the additional roads and bridges that we continue to build.

Our congressional leaders are well aware of this deficit. In fact, when they are determining how many taxpayer dollars to devote to our nation’s infrastructure, the need for maintenance is always top-of-mind. However, when states go to spend those dollars, they almost always prioritize costly highway expansion projects over needed repairs. And despite the clear public desire to see maintenance needs addressed, there is no federal requirement that they spend these funds any other way.

We can’t continue to build more roads and bridges if we can’t take care of the ones that already exist. Our federal funding needs to be focused on achieving a state of good repair.

For decades, Congress has poured money into the same flawed system. We’ve seen the results of that strategy. It’s time to make smarter investments in our transportation system. Starting now, we will continue to engage our congressional leaders to advance these three principles—and in the year ahead, we’ll be calling on you for help.

Complete Streets make a difference

People cycle and walk down a green path near a transit stop.

Though it’s an uphill battle, national efforts to prioritize safety over speed really can gain momentum and achieve results. The Complete Streets movement is one such example.

The term Complete Streets refers to an approach to planning, designing and building streets that enables safe access for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities. While every complete street is unique depending on a community’s local context, these streets ultimately support a variety of transportation options and enhance the quality of life for residents by promoting safety, accessibility, and sustainability.

While it wasn’t always this way, an overemphasis on vehicle travel at the expense of all other modes of transportation has resulted in incomplete streets being the default approach to transportation in the U.S. It’s our hope that decision-makers at every level will change that by prioritizing safety over speed.

The early days

The term “Complete Streets” was first coined in 2003 by Barbara McCann, who now serves as the Senior Advisor to the Associate Administrator for Safety at the Federal Highway Administration. Two years later, she helped form the National Complete Streets Coalition, now a program of Smart Growth America. This coalition has played a crucial role in advocating for Complete Streets policies and practices over the last 20 years.

One of the landmark moments in the movement’s history occurred in 2009 when the National Complete Streets Coalition released its first Complete Streets Policy Guide. This guide provided a comprehensive framework for communities to develop their own Complete Streets policies. An updated policy framework, released last year, which serves as a national model of best practices to create a policy at any level of government. Click here to see the updated framework.

Successes and ongoing challenges

The impact of Complete Streets policies can be seen in numerous cities across the United States. For example, the city of Portland, Oregon, is renowned for its successful implementation of Complete Streets principles. Portland’s emphasis on cycling infrastructure, pedestrian-friendly design, and transit options has contributed to its reputation as a model for sustainable urban transportation.

Similarly, New York City’s implementation of Complete Streets features, such as protected bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, has transformed its streetscape, making it safer and more accessible for residents and visitors alike. These examples underscore the potential of Complete Streets to create more vibrant, equitable, and sustainable urban environments.

Despite the successes, the Complete Streets movement faces several challenges. Implementing these principles often requires overcoming entrenched interests and overcoming budgetary constraints. Additionally, achieving broad public support and ensuring that all community members benefit from Complete Streets projects can be complex. The number of people hit and killed while walking continues to rise across the country, reflecting the need for decision makers at every level to prioritize safety over speed. Click here for the National Complete Streets Coalition’s reflections on the path ahead.

The Complete Streets movement reflects a growing recognition of the need for transportation systems that serve all members of society, and change is far from over. Over the past 20 years, the concept has evolved from a visionary idea to a widely accepted approach that is reshaping the way we think about and design our roadways. As cities continue to embrace Complete Streets principles, they pave the way for more equitable, sustainable, and livable communities, setting a new standard for how we envision and experience our public spaces.

The loss of transportation choices in the U.S.

Investments and policies that support car travel at the expense of all other transportation options have helped create a culture of driving in the U.S. Investing in a variety of transportation choices, like opportunities to bike, walk, and take public transit, would improve safety and accessibility for all.

The ghost of walkable streets’ past

Before the car started to take off in the early 1930s, streets were for everyone. Wagons, walkers, bikers, horses, they all utilized the street to get to daily activities and destinations. Pre-Industrial Revolution Americans would walk between 10,000 and 18,000 steps per day, and high rates of walking and biking to work or school continued throughout the late 60s. Because the street was so widely used by many different forms of transport, it functioned as a public space, a place where children could play as much as cyclists could bike to the store.

Three cyclists travel down a wide path in this black-and-white photo — *NYC Parks Photo Archive*

When cars began rising in popularity in the 1920s, they entered a space not designed for them, posing a danger to other travelers. The public grew alarmed at rising death tolls and vehicle crashes, calling for reduced vehicle speeds and more protections from the car. Automakers, dealers, and enthusiasts flipped their narrative, advocating for legislation and funding campaigns that sought to regulate and restrict where people could walk and bike.

The latter campaign succeeded, but it didn’t make our streets safer. Instead, streets ultimately became a place where quick, convenient car travel is often prioritized over the safety and comfort of all other road users. In 2022, the number of people hit and killed while walking reached a 40-year high.

The illusion of choice

Post-WWII in the United States was a time of world-building, of focusing on creating a brighter future for the country in the aftermath of destruction. The infrastructure that came along with this shift made suburban lifestyles the ideal, and the car a symbol of freedom. A combination of economic incentives and a deprioritization of dense, mixed-use development led to sprawling cities with destinations spread far apart, connected by high-speed roadways.

Today, Americans are driving more for the same basic tasks. Research from Transportation for America and Third Way found that households in both rural and urban areas are driving significantly farther per trip as of 2017 than they were in 2001 to accomplish their commutes and daily tasks. Often, driving is the only convenient, safe, and reliable transportation option available, requiring households to shoulder the cost of a vehicle in order to access their daily needs. When people can’t afford regular access to a vehicle, when their car breaks down, or when they otherwise don’t have the ability to drive, they must navigate a transportation system that wasn’t built for them.

A lack of safe transportation options leads to reduced access to economic opportunity, increased risk of being hit by a vehicle, and higher rates of air pollution. These trends are felt by everyone, but they have the harshest impact on low-income communities and communities of color.

Reminder that we destroyed our own cities.

(Main & Delaware Street, Kansas City) pic.twitter.com/2SojGFDPbp
— Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) September 1, 2023

We need Complete Streets

Decisions made in the past have left our streets incomplete, prioritizing one way of travel over a wealth of other options. Complete Streets are streets that are safe for all users and that connect community members to the resources they need. This blog is the first installation of a four-part series on the Complete Streets movement. Keep an eye out for our next blog, where we’ll dissect the origins of the Complete Streets movement and what it aims to achieve.

We need to expand the conversation on transportation safety

A cyclist travels down a busy highway on their way to Baltimore.

We can’t significantly address safety concerns if we’re not looking at the most dangerous modes of transportation.

On May 9, the chairman of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, Representative Sam Graves, and the chairman of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, Representative Rick Crawford highlighted recent increases in crime reports according to FTA-tracked data. The period of time evaluated (2020-2022) represents some of the worst times for transit as agencies struggled to deliver service, ridership fell, and travel behavior changed across the country.

Transit safety is foundational to encouraging communities to utilize this public resource and enjoy its numerous benefits, including economic, environmental, and public health benefits. It is essential that federal investments protect taxpayers as they travel. Unfortunately, Representatives Graves and Crawford failed to take note of the need for safety enhancements for all modes of transportation, including modes that are far more dangerous than taking the bus.

From 2020-2022, during that same period highlighted by Graves and Crawford, fatalities on our roadways exploded. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, projected roadway fatalities increased from 39,007 to 42,795. According to Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design report, the number of people hit and killed while walking grew to 7,522 in 2022, marking a 40-year high.

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, passenger car occupants are the primary victims in highway fatalities, totaling more than 10,000 deaths each year since 2010. By contrast, non-rail public transit occupants (like bus riders) accounted for less than 100 highway fatalities each year. Other types of public transit, like subways, accounted for less than 300 transportation-related fatalities each year. (To fully understand these numbers, it’s important to note that highway fatalities, including non-rail public transit, counted only direct fatalities like deaths that occur due to a collision. Other types of public transit included incident-related fatalities, and so these deaths are likely overstated in comparison.)

Whether we’re driving, biking, walking, or taking public transit, we should be able to travel safely. But when representatives like Crawford derail the conversation to “shine a light” on transit security alone, it unnecessarily discourages and scares individuals from riding public transportation, despite it being statistically safer than operating a private vehicle.

Increased operations funding can help support transit agencies’ efforts to improve safety. Hiring transit ambassadors and having security officers on board are just two interventions that would support crime mitigation efforts. Collaborating with local services to support housing and mental health could help address criminal activity from multiple angles.

Transit ambassadors point a rider in the right direction — *(LA Metro)*

Safety must be a priority—no matter how we travel

We’re glad federal representatives are having conversations about transportation safety, and we hope to see these conversations translate into increased funding for transit operations and security. But to truly address dangerous travel conditions, we need to consider the full picture. We hope to see additional efforts to address the top contributor to transportation-related fatalities in the US: private vehicles on high-speed roads.

Find out how we can enhance safety for all road users by improving street design. Read Dangerous by Design here.

Dangerous by Design 2024: Deaths of people walking up 75% since 2010

The 2024 edition of Dangerous by Design is out now, combining federal data with lived experience to unpack the connection between roadway design and the ever-increasing record deaths of people walking. The report ranks the most dangerous metros in the United States based on pedestrian fatalities from 2018 to 2022. Click here to access the report’s analysis of the deadliest metro areas and national trends > >

The number of people struck and killed on our roadways continues to rise—reaching 7,522 in the latest available federal reporting, a 75 percent increase since 2010. That’s an average of more than 20 per day. We found that almost every metro in the U.S. was deadlier for people walking in 2022 than in 2021.

Smart Growth America’s rankings of 101 metro areas show that nearly every metro has gotten more dangerous—and those that didn’t get worse have remained about the same.

This year, Memphis was ranked the deadliest city for pedestrians. 344 people died from 2018-2022, an increase of 158 deaths compared to the previous five-year period.

As in previous editions of the report, Smart Growth America found that Black and Indigenous Americans, older adults, and people walking in low-income communities still face the greatest risk.

Read the first installment of the report here to learn more about this year’s metro rankings and how pedestrian deaths impact people from different metro areas, races and ethnicities, income levels, and ages. And stay tuned for upcoming Dangerous by Design releases this summer, sharing analysis for states and congressional districts.

Rethinking the intersection to prioritize safety over speed

A cyclist crosses an intersection with the aid of a green bicycle crossing signal

The rising rate of pedestrian fatalities is a consequence of deadly design decisions that prioritize driver speed and convenience over the safety of all other road users. Today, we dig into one example: crosswalk signals.

As communities work to advance safe streets, they must also ensure that these efforts lead to design changes that effectively integrate with the technology managing traffic flow for all users. Many walk signals are timed based on outdated standards that prioritize maximum green time for all motorized vehicle movements. Signal timing gets reviewed on a case-by-case basis, leveraging a manual last published in 2015 that isn’t supplemented often to consider the diverse needs of pedestrians, such as people with disabilities, seniors, cyclists, or parents with strollers.

Walk signals are just one example of how our infrastructure prioritizes the speed of vehicles over the safety of other road users. This practice comes at a deadly cost.

We are in the midst of a historic and alarming increase in the number of people struck and killed while walking, which has been on a steady rise since 2009, reaching levels not seen in more than 30 years. Speed is the number one culprit in these fatalities. Speed is also the best predictor of whether or not a collision will result in an injury or death. Design elements, including effective traffic signals, are essential to reducing speeds and improving safety.

If not designed correctly, intersections can be one of the most dangerous places where folks in and outside of cars interact. There are many recent examples of places that experience a high number of crashes at crosswalks. Saint Paul, Minnesota is a prime example of this. In 2016, Shelby Kokesch was killed while attempting to cross Kellogg Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare, from the Minnesota History Center. Though Kokesch used a marked crosswalk, it lacked a stop sign or a crossing signal. While one car pulled over to let Kokesch and her mother pass, the second vehicle—an SUV—did not stop.

At the time, Saint Paul responded with higher traffic enforcement around crosswalks, ticketing drivers who failed to stop at marked crosswalks and yield to pedestrians. During the crackdown, Sergeant Jeremy Ellison reflected, “An overwhelming response from people is, ‘I didn’t see them.’ People are not paying attention and they’re driving too fast.”

This is a design problem—and it has a design solution

Signalized intersections draw attention to pedestrian crossings and help ensure that traffic comes to a complete stop before travelers enter the crosswalk. Street design can be more influential on driver behavior than speed limits or enforcement alone. Complete Streets—an approach to designing streets that prioritizes the safety and comfort of people who walk, bike, and roll—can lead to slower driver speeds, reducing the risk of crashes and roadway fatalities for folks both in and outside of cars.

Designing an intersection with safety in mind can take a lot of different forms, such as shortening the length of an intersection by reducing the number of vehicle lanes—or by ensuring appropriate time to cross the street. Walk signals and walk signal timing also play an important role by giving pedestrians adequate time to cross. For example, leading pedestrian intervals allow pedestrians to begin crossing the street before cars turn right or left, signaling to drivers that pedestrians are present and making it easier for them to see and yield to other people using the road.

One aspect of a Complete Streets approach is practicing effective community engagement. Administering walk audits with a variety of road users, community residents, and decision makers can assist municipal planners in determining whether a signal offers enough time to cross the street. By implementing this approach, planners and engineers can experience a street in the same way as the people who travel on it every day. Using this method can allow cities and states to make their streets safer and more accessible.

Pedestrian fatalities will continue to rise until we prioritize the safety of all road users over the speed of a few. The effective use of crosswalk signals, combined with other elements of safe street design, can reduce the danger on our roadways and ensure that everyone can safely get to where they need to go. Learn more about a Complete Streets approach here.

Celebrating 20 years of Complete Streets

A calm tree-lined street in Brooklyn, NY hosts one lane of car traffic, a bike lane, street parking, and a median to shorten the crosswalk distance for pedestrians.

The term “Complete Streets” was coined two decades ago, and while a lot of progress has been made, the fight for safe streets is far from over. To commemorate 20 years of the Complete Streets movement, we’ve rounded up some resources that can help you keep up the fight.

Barbara McCann, the current Senior Advisor to the Associate Administrator for Safety at the Federal Highway Administration (and the first Founding Director of the National Complete Streets Coalition) wrote a blog post to commemorate Complete Streets’ 20-year anniversary.

Thousands of planners, engineers, and others in government, consulting, and public interest groups have worked … to make safety for all users routine in policies and in practice. Now more than 1,700 Complete Streets policies are remaking transportation projects across the country.
—Barbara McCann

But we know this work is far from over. One of our three guiding principles at Transportation for America is safety over speed, a rule that we hope will guide decision makers to reduce the speed of vehicles and prioritize the safety of people walking and rolling to their essential destinations. And while some key safety programs passed in the 2021 infrastructure law, the federal spending bill left even more money available for the deadly status quo, which means we’ll need to keep advocating for safer streets at the local, state, and federal levels in the years ahead.

Our colleagues at the National Complete Streets Coalition (NCSC) are doing the same—and arming advocates with tools to join the movement. Take a look at some of their most recent resources.

1. Policy Action Guide

In partnership with CityHealth, NCSC produced this guide to equip planners and practitioners with practical resources for overcoming barriers and navigating the complexities of policy implementation. From building coalitions to crafting compelling narratives, it offers a comprehensive toolkit for effecting change at the state and local level. Access it here.

2. Complete Streets Story Map

Spread the word about the Complete Streets movement. Whether you’re a planner, engineer, advocate, or new to the smart growth space, the Complete Streets story map (produced in partnership with CityHealth) can serve as an interactive tool that breaks down what makes a Complete Street and why they’re important. The tool also features two case studies—Pittsburgh, PA and Milwaukee, WI—that demonstrate how these communities achieved their Complete Streets vision. Learn more here.

3. Policy Evaluation Tool

NCSC evaluates and scores Complete Streets policies across the country using their Policy Framework (updated just last year). Now, advocates and policymakers can do the same, using a free and open-source tool to evaluate existing or drafted local, MPO, or state-level Complete Streets policies. Use the tool.

There’s more to come

Smart Growth America will soon release a summary of their 2023 Complete Streets Leadership Academies, where they partnered with states and local communities to implement safe street design on state-owned roadways. Stay tuned to see what they learned from this year-long technical assistance project in communities across the country—and keep following us here for more opportunities to advance street safety where you live.

Road feels unsafe? DOT says prove it!

In the United States, where and how traffic deaths occur are painfully predictable. But even with historically high levels of funding available, traffic engineering standards and federal policy combine to create a safety catch-22, ensuring that a transportation agency walking the walk on traffic safety is the exception, not the rule.

Photo by Nk Ni via Unsplash

If you’re somebody who walks or rolls to get to work, school, or any of your other daily needs, chances are that you know the most dangerous parts of your local transportation system: the crosswalk that cars don’t stop at because there’s no light, the bike lane that ends abruptly, or the sidewalk ramp pointed to the middle of an intersection instead of the crosswalk. When you go through these areas, you might think that they’re oversights, mistakes made by an inattentive traffic engineer or planner who would make the adjustment needed if they just walked or rolled a mile in your shoes. But in reality, these flaws are part and parcel of a broader system that requires either reckless behavior or deaths to make the case for safety.

Instead of proactively asserting a right for people to walk and roll safely and conveniently outside of a vehicle, the standards that DOTs use to determine when and where they put safety infrastructure actually require people to either risk their bodies or experience harm before any paint or concrete are poured.

Transportation for America is a program of Smart Growth America, an organization that empowers communities through technical assistance, advocacy, and thought leadership to realize our vision of livable places, healthy people, and shared prosperity. See how Smart Growth America is engaging with National Pedestrian Safety Month here.

The safety infrastructure catch-22

One hot summer morning in 2021, I went to an unsignalized intersection in Northern Virginia and watched people wait for a break in traffic to cross a road that was 60-feet wide, dividing homes and a bus stop from a food bank. Though state law makes it legal for people to cross on foot at unsignalized intersections, it’s obviously a risky, unsafe thing to do.

Google Maps screenshot of Fordson Road, Alexandria, VA at 7558 Fordson Road, showing three lanes of traffic and no marked crosswalk

Unsignalized intersection on Fordson Road in Alexandria, VA

But this is the catch-22: For the state DOT (VDOT) to paint a crosswalk there, they require that at least 20 people choose to cross that dangerous street each hour.¹ Put another way, if enough people engage in risky, unsafe behaviors, the state might decide to make it safer. But when it’s unsafe to walk and roll, fewer people are going to do so. And with fewer people walking and rolling, DOTs like VDOT think that there’s little demand for safe infrastructure.

This unproductive cycle is the product of street design standards and manuals that your local traffic engineer relies on and navigates in order to make their decisions. In some cases, as NACTO says about the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), it can actually “require multiple people to die at an intersection before a pedestrian signal is ‘warranted’.”

Why did the pedestrian cross the road?

The people who pay the price for this nonsense approach to safety are people like Filadelfo Ramos Marquez. Filadelfo was killed in December 2021 while crossing an eight-lane road in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Those responsible for the street’s design can choose to blame the victim for not using a crosswalk as a way of abdicating their responsibility, or they can ask: why did he cross where he did, and how do we make it safer?

Google Maps screenshot of VA-123, showing the pedestrian bridge in the background connecting to the metro station on the right. A car enters the roadway through a slip lane. There are at least six lanes of traffic shown.

Road conditions where Filadelfo was hit and killed.

Although this intersection has traffic lights, the only way to cross it on foot is via a pedestrian bridge. However, when the metro station that the bridge connects to closes, so does the bridge itself. If Filadelfo thought that the station was already closed at 9 p.m., or that he had to pay a metro fare in order to use the bridge, then he had two choices: cross where he did, or add a third of a mile to his trip in order to use a painted crosswalk.

This leads us to the broader point: We do not currently measure OR care about the travel time of people who walk and roll. Pedestrians’ time isn’t just worth less than that of drivers, it’s not measured at all. In VDOT’s standards for an unmarked crosswalk at an unsignalized intersection, like the one I went to in summer 2021, the agency effectively says (starting on page A4) that saving pedestrians time is fine, so long as it doesn’t affect too many drivers.

The intersection where Filadelfo was hit, with signals for cars but no accommodations at all for pedestrians, illustrates this biased tradeoff just the same. When this metro station was built, planners and engineers could’ve viewed it as an opportunity to improve the pedestrian experience, both around this one stop and along this entire corridor where crosswalks are routinely over 130 feet long. Seeing as Tysons Corner has two huge shopping malls, is one of the largest job centers in Virginia, and aims to be home to 100,000 residents by 2050, some might say this would’ve been prudent. But that would have required deprioritizing the 46,000 vehicles per day that drove here pre-pandemic. So instead of building the much shorter, much less expensive straight-line street-level crossing, they built the longer, more expensive pedestrian bridge. And now, instead of asking why pedestrians like Filadelfo still choose to cross roads like this, DOTs like VDOT simply pray they don’t.

A Google Maps aerial screenshot showing Filadelfo's route on the day of the crash. An orange line routes along the sidewalk and crosswalk, showing the loop he would've had to make to be as safe as possible if the pedestrian bridge was closed. A green line shows the route using the pedestrian bridge. A red line shows the route Filadelfo took, cutting through several lanes of high-speed traffic, just to the west of bridge.

Potential pedestrian routes in the area where Filadelfo was hit and killed. The green line shows the path using the pedestrian bridge that connects to the metro station. The orange line shows the route to the only marked crosswalk nearby. The red line and white arrow show Filadelfo’s route and the general area where he was hit.

The safety funding catch-22

One reason agencies seem to prefer the thoughts and prayers approach to traffic safety is that federal policy encourages them to. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) poured over $400 billion into roads and streets across the United States, but with few requirements for anyone to measurably improve safety. Although all of that money could be used to ensure the safety of all road users, most of it won’t be.

Instead, in exchange for billions in largely flexible formula grants they control, states are required to set safety performance targets each year. But the reality is almost laughable: states can literally set targets for more people to die without penalty, and there is almost no penalty for failing to meet even the most unambitious targets. Failing to meet targets just requires those states to spend their Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) dollars on highway safety improvement projects. And if vulnerable road users (VRUs) make up more than fifteen percent of all fatalities in a state, that state has to spend fifteen percent of their HSIP funds the next year on safety projects for VRUs. (However, most states aren’t even obligating all the safety funds they need to.)

In contrast, if local governments want to access funds specifically earmarked for safety, they usually have to spend time and money applying for competitive discretionary grants, like the Safe Streets and Roads for All program. Although this is better than nothing, and there’s additional marginal progress being made, the IIJA has the same double standard for safety that it does for climate: projects that improve safety are the exception, whereas projects that don’t are the rule.

And so long as making streets safer comes with tangible costs but traffic deaths do not, people will pay with their lives. The day before Filadelfo was struck, Matthew Jaeger was killed while riding a bike a few miles down that very same road.

To get to the other side

Changes need to come from the top down and the bottom up. Congress needs to stop creating small new programs for improving safety. After giving them billions to spend, Congress should hold states accountable for reducing fatalities. For states that fail to do so, this could mean requiring them to transfer money out of block grant programs (like the the National Highway Performance Program and Surface Transportation Block Grants) and move it to HSIP for every year that they don’t meet their targets.

USDOT can finish updating the MUTCD and improving the Green Book. In the meantime, if states can prove these documents interfere with achieving safety targets due to their erroneous assumption that speed is safety, USDOT should waive these design standards. The agency can also ensure regulations like the New Car Assessment Program look at how the weight, size, visibility, and marketing of vehicles keeps all road users safe.

States control the most dangerous streets, and they stay dangerous because states continue to prioritize speed and vehicle throughput over safety—as with the corridor that killed Matthew and Filadelfo. States actually addressing this danger would see immediate results in pedestrian safety.

And while cities press their states for action on the deadly state-owned arterial roads within their borders, they are free to make the streets they do control safer. They can pass Complete Streets policies, discarding their state’s speed-first design guidelines, and adopt modern street design guidance that prioritizes moving people and creating safe streets for everyone. (The IIJA made a vital change to allow cities to adopt NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide, even if their state prohibits it.)

Anything less than these changes isn’t prioritizing safety. It’s just a catch-22.

Find more recommendations to make our roadways safer in Dangerous by Design.

AVs aren’t solving our transportation problems. They’re automating them.

A car rests just before a crosswalk on a wide roadway

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been dangled as a transportation “silver bullet” for decades. Now, they’re finally operating as robo-taxis in San Francisco. However, the Bay Area’s experience with these vehicles so far shows that it’s our reliance on cars—not who’s behind the wheel—that’s our most pressing problem.

On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted to allow two autonomous vehicle (AV) companies to operate robo-taxis in San Francisco 24 hours a day and charge for the rides. This decision came despite significant, wide-ranging opposition, brought up before the hearing and highlighted during. As part of limited, fare-free pilots conducted by these companies, San Franciscans have experienced exactly the chaos that replacing imperfect humans with impartial computers was supposed to solve.

This decision by the CPUC is a continuation of the mistakes we’ve made with our transportation systems for the past century. AVs are assumed to be the solution to dangerous streets, traffic congestion, and transportation emissions. Unfortunately, as they’re set up right now, AVs are nothing more than a distraction from the policy changes that would make our transportation system safer, more equitable, and more sustainable.

The unmet promise of automating transportation

Automating transportation isn’t a bad idea. In fact, automated transportation has existed for decades, in the form of public transit. Automated metros in places like Tokyo, Vancouver, and now even Montreal and Honolulu move millions of people every day around the globe. At airports across the U.S. you can also find automated “people movers” helping people move between terminals and access local transportation options. These technologies are highly regulated and implemented with a clear purpose: they reduce operating costs while increasing the capacity of public transit, allowing more people to travel.

For nearly a century now, car-makers have been arguing that automation could similarly revolutionize car travel. As historian Peter Norton has described, the automobile industry has depicted self-driving cars as a generation away for the past several decades. For people who can’t drive due to a disability, people too old to drive, people too young to drive, and people who simply don’t want to drive, this technology would be transformative.

Unfortunately, even if this future were as close as it seems, it may not live up to its promise. According to an advertisement by Cruise—one of the two companies now operating robo-taxis in San Francisco—if their technology was behind the wheel instead of humans, we would have far fewer deaths on our roadways because their products are “designed to save lives.”

This contrasts with reporting and data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) highlighting that AVs are certainly still involved in crashes, many of which result in serious injuries and fatalities. San Francisco’s experience as an AV-guinea pig provides some data on crashes and some insight into AVs’ current flaws. There are documented cases of AVs driving away from police, cruising down sidewalks, and coming to a dead halt when cell service is bad. While AV makers say these are anomalies, without data from the companies to disprove this we can only believe what we see plainly before us.

Beyond safety, AV proponents also promise less wasted time. With our cars driving themselves, we will be able to travel everywhere we need to go while still being able to work, catch up with friends and loved ones, or just relax from inside a car. However, this argument assumes that the amount we drive stays the same, an unlikely scenario when driving no longer requires anybody actually driving. In fact, research replicating an AV future and an analysis of data from existing partially automated driving technology show that AVs will lead people to spend significantly more time on car travel.

This additional time spent in a car also threatens to torpedo any hopes of a more sustainable transportation system. No matter whether AVs are electric or not, a future with more driving would still involve more extraction of natural resources and more pollution from tires and brakes. We will never reach ambitious climate targets with a transportation system that requires people to drive more, not less.

Promising a technological solution to a political problem—and then using political will to force their solution on society—is a consistent behavior of the auto-industry. In the 1920s, the industry knew that their products were killing children and congesting city streets. But instead of changing their products, they changed our communities. They created and supported the policies that have destroyed vibrant neighborhoods and displaced their residents, emitted huge amounts of carbon, and killed tens of thousands of us every year. That’s not innovation, it’s exploitation.

Selling us a bill of hoods

If AVs were being pursued because they were the most effective way to help people who will never be able to drive, maintain mobility for aging members of our communities, and save lives, we would all welcome them with open arms. That’s why the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety have released a list of tenets, which Transportation for America has signed on to, to guide an introduction of AVs into our vehicle fleet.

These guardrails aren’t an attempt to stop us from getting to a self-driving future. These policies are what’s required to ensure that the future includes everybody, including those outside of a car. That’s why individuals and advocacy organizations who exist to make transportation safer have made it clear: without changes to transportation policy, AVs aren’t set up to solve our problems, just automate them.

Right now, AV-makers would have us believe that all of our transportation concerns will go away if we simply replace human drivers with computers. But we know this is not true. Automation that leads to more driving will not reduce congestion or emissions. It will not free people from increasingly long trips to reach their essential destinations. It will not relieve people of the financial burden of car ownership. And it will not change the dangerous design of our roadways, which encourages high vehicle speeds at the cost of pedestrian safety. If we continue to give AV-makers free reign, without government regulation and data collection to understand their impact on our roadways, we will not get any closer to solving the problems AVs are supposedly ready to solve.

AV-makers—including the robo taxi companies in San Francisco —aren’t trying to solve these problems. They’re just trying to sell us cars.

VIDEO: Pedestrian fatalities continue to rise. Here’s why.

Beth Osborne talks with a CBS reporter on the side of a wide, busy roadway as a car speeds past

In a conversation with CBS Sunday Morning, T4A’s executive director Beth Osborne explains that our roads are dangerous by design.

If you watch CBS on Sunday mornings, you might have caught our own Beth Osborne talking about dangerous street design. She was joined by John Barth, who’s working on Complete Streets implementation in Indianapolis, and Latanya Byrd, a safe streets advocate in Philadelphia.

In the clip, Beth explained why more people are being hit and killed on our nation’s roadways. She noted that vehicles have gotten bigger, and streets continue to be designed for speed over safety. As we explained in our report Dangerous by Design, the combination of speed and size leads to deadly consequences for people walking, particularly people of color.

The interview follows news from the Governors Highway Safety Association that pedestrian fatalities reached a 40-year high in 2022. But people walking aren’t the only ones who pay the costs.

“It turns out when we build things unsafe for pedestrians, we build them unsafe for everybody. There’s really nobody winning in this system,” said Beth.

Rising fatalities a sign to modernize federal design framework

A young woman holds onto her bicycle, waiting for the ped signal to cross a crosswalk showing signs of wear.

Despite a binding requirement to release an updated version more than a month ago, the Federal Highway Administration missed the deadline to release a new edition of a federal handbook with national influence on street design. There were many positive changes proposed for this edition, but unless this delay comes because further improvements are underway, this new edition might ultimately be another green light for increasing traffic fatalities.

Edit 6/30: Language in an earlier version of this post overstated the power of the MUTCD in shaping street design. While this manual is influential, other important resources inform street design, including the Green Book. This language has been changed.

As Smart Growth America wrote in their 2022 report Dangerous by Design, the number of people struck and killed while walking reached yet another new high in 2020. More than 6,500 people were struck and killed while walking in 2020, an average of nearly 18 per day, and a 4.5 percent increase over 2019. This epidemic continues growing worse because our nation’s streets are designed primarily to move cars quickly at the expense of keeping everyone safe, but change can be made on every level to reorient toward protecting the most vulnerable rather than prioritizing the speed of a few.

There’s one Dangerous by Design recommendation that the federal government can take action on right away: an update to the little-known but highly influential Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), defines standards for traffic control devices, which includes pedestrian crossings and lane markings like green bike lanes and red bus-only lanes. Though the current MUTCD prioritizes vehicle speed over pedestrian safety, the 11th edition MUTCD is an opportunity for the FHWA to make changes that benefit all road users—if they incorporate advocate feedback. Some proposed changes with potential include an update to the notorious 85th percentile speed standard, a decision on colorful crosswalks, and improvements for pedestrian crossing times. However, although these proposed changes might look good on paper, the revised MUTCD will likely leave most existing road networks as dangerous as ever.

85th percentile standard

While there’s no shortage of examples of the MUTCD placing the high-speed movement of cars at the top of the transportation hierarchy, there’s perhaps no greater example than that of the 85th-percentile speed standard. This standard sets what the National Transportation Safety Board calls a dangerous precedent for determining speeds: out of 100 drivers, the 15th fastest driver sets the speed limit.

The intent behind this is to lower the difference in speed between the fastest drivers and the slowest, with the idea being that the cause of crashes is the difference in speed, not speed itself. But this flawed logic ignores that as speed increases, the probability of fatalities for vulnerable road users increases exponentially. Blanket application of the 85th-percentile speed to arterials across the country has helped create the current crisis of pedestrian injuries and deaths—the majority of which now occur on state DOT-owned roads.

In the proposed edits for the new MUTCD, the 85th-percentile standard would be redesignated to a “guidance.” While that sounds better, this does not address the fact that unsafe roads in compliance with the new guidance would still be dangerous by design. Without providing engineers with safe design standards (like standards for road diets, raised crosswalks, chicanes, and narrower lanes), it would be impossible for this minor change to undo the speed status quo. The existence of the 85th-percentile rule is proof we know people will drive as fast as they feel comfortable. By softening the standard to a guidance, the MUTCD still fails to address design. State DOTs would still be responsible for choosing where to implement the rule on their roads, and without a change in standard practice or culture, it’s unclear what effect this change could actually have.

Pedestrian crossings

There are plenty of other standards in the MUTCD that foster dangerous design. Pedestrian volume per hour during “peak hours” is a main determining metric of what warrants a pedestrian signal at an intersection or midblock crossing. But peak hours focus on peak times for vehicular traffic, and what might be peak hours for a driver can be the worst, most uncomfortable time for a person to attempt to cross a busy roadway. Worse still, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s FARS data has consistently shown that the deadliest hours for pedestrians are often well outside of what’s considered “peak.”

FHWA graph shows higher rates of pedestrian deaths after 6 p.m. — *A graph from the FHWA describing pedestrian fatalities by hour from 2006-2020. Credit: FHWA*

This leads to a deadly feedback loop that works against the most vulnerable—if the road feels unsafe or inconvenient to cross, no one will attempt to use it except for those with the fewest options. Hostile design makes it nearly impossible to safely walk the span of a roadway to reach services when you have to contend with multiple lanes of high-speed traffic.

Just as people are more likely to drive on a wide, comfortable roadway, they’re more likely to walk on a sidewalk that feels safe. However, some MUTCD-compliant designs are so dangerous that cities feel the need to give their pedestrians bright red flags just for them to cross the road—an ineffective solution to a design problem.

Like with the 85th percentile standard, the 11th edition shifts pedestrian volume per hour warrants from a standard to a guidance, and tinkers with other technicalities. Some changes are good, and could even result in longer, safer crossing times or more flashing pedestrian crossing beacons. But even if the proposed changes are adopted, they lack teeth. DOTs would be left to their own devices to enact the changes, and they could still point to the guidance as reason to not install a crossing.

*MUTCD compliant crossing in Knoxville, Tennessee. Would you feel safe crossing here? Source: Google Maps*

Colored crosswalks

Research has shown that bright, colorful crosswalks and intersections make streets safer by drawing drivers’ eyes to the pedestrian crossing with the added benefit of creating more vibrant streets. However, since 2001, the FHWA has officially discouraged communities from using art at crosswalks and has consistently sent letters to cities ordering them to remove their art, or lose federal funding. FHWA justified their requests by claiming colorful crosswalks do not enhance safety, despite the fact that the agency has yet to conclude research on the topic. There is no apparent plan for public access to the research underlying the next edition’s ruling.

A roller skater and bicyclist cross a rainbow-colored crosswalk — Colored crosswalks, like the rainbow crosswalk above, can be an attractive way to signal for drivers to stop and look for pedestrians. The right design can also signify community and belonging. Photo source: Long Beach Public Works

If text in other sections of the proposed changes is any indication, the FHWA has an interest in maintaining total uniformity in crosswalks for the benefit of automated vehicles. Automated vehicles (AVs) see the world through artificial intelligence-based machine vision and have difficulty adapting to the dynamic scenarios common to urban environments, even if these are the same scenarios that are more likely to draw the attention of human drivers.

AVs benefit from road environments with minimal variety and maximum contrast, and the 11th edition will likely propose prescriptive changes that would require road markings to be wider, brighter, and more frequent, explicitly for AVs. It is unclear why the FHWA seems willing to offer new concessions for vehicles that have so far failed to provide a proven safety benefit, but remain unwilling to allow changes that are proving to make vulnerable road users safer.

The bottom line

With speed and throughput of cars as the leading success metric, the so-called best practices outlined in previous editions of the MUTCD have increased the viability of cars at the expense of all other road users, including public transit, pedestrians, and cyclists. We are glad to see changes that allow for safer street design, but in the face of rising pedestrian fatalities, the 11th edition of the MUTCD doesn’t go far enough.

FHWA has made some progress on prioritizing safety over speed in other recent guidance. However, when it comes to the definitive guide to traffic control, making minor revisions in the midst of a crisis of fatalities that seem to increase year after year is a failure to meet the moment. We hope the extra time spent on the new edition has gone toward creating a safer MUTCD.

Eliminating driver error doesn’t work. What does? Part II: Designing solutions

In part I of this blog series, we reviewed the evidence on three roadway safety strategies that rely on changing driver behavior—education, enforcement, and technology—to show where they fall short in making America’s roads safer. Design-based solutions, which accept and plan for human mistakes, can avoid the pitfalls of behavioral solutions. A recent report from New York City’s Department of Transportation sheds some light on which of those solutions work best—and for whom.

Streets and roads designed for safety—not speed—are tried and true interventions that reduce injuries and deaths. They require minimal driver education, because self-educating driver cues are built in. They have self-enforcing geometric features that force drivers to obey traffic laws without the threat of police violence. And while technology can be a critical part of safe road design, slower vehicle speeds lessen the need for fast-acting automated systems to avoid crashes.

What does a safely designed street look like? Fundamentally, it is a street with features—like narrower and fewer lanes, extended curbs, and bike lanes—that accept the mistakes made by human drivers and induce slower vehicle speeds to minimize the danger caused by those mistakes. Safe streets better reflect the complexity of a street with many different types of traffic, and are often called Complete Streets. Safe streets are going to look different in every place they’re implemented, since they are necessarily responsive to local contexts. But across the board, safe street design 1) lowers speeds and 2) considers all road users.

Learn more about safe street design, and the fatal impact of ignoring it, in Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design report.

Evidence from the Big Apple

A recent report from New York City’s Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) provides some of the best data to date on the effectiveness of seven specific features of NYC’s safe street design efforts: road diets, conventional (unprotected) bike lanes, protected bike lanes, pedestrian islands, curb and sidewalk extensions, turn calming, and leading pedestrian intervals. Read more on each of these features in the report.

*Percent change in pedestrian injuries and those killed or seriously injured (KSI). Source: NYC DOT*

The results of the report show a massive impact from safe street design. In the above table, KSI stands for pedestrians killed or seriously injured. All the design features significantly reduced pedestrian deaths and injuries, with all but conventional bike lanes reducing pedestrian deaths and serious injuries by over 25 percent. These safety benefits were even more pronounced for senior pedestrians.

*Percent change in driver injuries and those killed or seriously injured (KSI). Source:* *NYC DOT*

The safety benefits also extended to motor vehicle occupants, with all the features but turn calming (which was affected by a small sample size) reducing injuries and deaths for motor vehicle occupants at nearly the same rate as pedestrians.

Street design as a core safety strategy

*One of T4A’s core principles is to design for safety over speed. Read our full platform.*

The cross-user benefits of safe street and road design are not unique to New York City. A review done by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of rural roadways in Warren County, Pennsylvania and Augusta County, Virginia found that self-enforcing, safer street design led to fewer crashes. RAO Community Health, a nonprofit in the highly car-dependent Charlotte, North Carolina, has begun modeling the benefits of safer street design to the city’s most vulnerable communities.

Every year, more states and localities all around the country recognize the safety benefits of Complete Streets, adopting policies to promote their construction. The U.S. Department of Transportation has incorporated the principles of safe street design into their national Safe Systems Approach.

The core of the success behind design is simple: it slows vehicles down. The basic fact of the matter is that vehicle speed and road safety are opposing forces. The higher a drivers’ speed, the greater risk of fatalities. No amount of education, enforcement, or technology can make up for the fact that mistakes are inevitable. Safe street design can ensure that mistakes need not be fatal.

Want to learn more about the benefits Complete Streets can bring to your community? Try this tool from the National Complete Streets Coalition.

What’s next?

Advocates and governments should leverage the well-documented track record of safe road design in reducing crashes, injuries, and fatalities (both domestically and internationally) to push for its adoption in every jurisdiction around the country. The Vision Zero movement has done excellent work in shifting the paradigm toward design. Nearly 40,000 people were killed on our roadways in 2020. If the U.S. wants to cut down this unfathomable number of fatalities, every community will need to rethink its road design standards.

Changes at the federal level could work to support these local efforts. For one, the FHWA needs to incorporate its Safe Systems Approach into its new Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), the national standards for roadway design used by every jurisdiction around the country. Better national guidance on safe streets will encourage more localities to act. But it’s worth noting that the MUTCD is not gospel. State and local governments can design roads in any way they want. Advocates should remind their local officials of this fact.

In addition, FHWA must marshal all available federal funds toward safety projects. This includes not only small, safety-specific competitive grant programs like Safe Streets and Roads for All, but also broader programs like RAISE grants and federal formula dollars. We’ve outlined a strategy for federal safety spending here > >

Now you know what works, but how can you communicate the need for design to practitioners? Stay tuned for part III of this series, which will include useful advice on doing just that.

We’re living in an arterial world

a child stands in front of a long crosswalk

The 99% Invisible podcast discussed the Netflix show Old Enough, where Japanese children run their first errands, explaining how street design lets the show’s participants be both safe and independent from a young age. We explore the flip side of this coin in the United States, where convenience for cars becomes a major inconvenience for anybody who can’t drive one.

For most of my childhood, I lived along a minor arterial road, right next to the outer loop of the Beltway in Washington, D.C.’s suburbs. Although the speed limit was, and still is, technically 35 mph, the road was wide and unobstructed enough that drivers routinely felt comfortable driving 50 mph, and so they frequently did. Combined with the lack of any shoulder, much less a sidewalk, this meant that the only way for me to access the outside world was through the back of my parent’s station wagon. To go to school, get to soccer practice, have a playdate with a friend, or pick up the jacket I frequently forgot at any of the above locations, one of my parents had to stop whatever they were doing to drive me there and back. When they weren’t available to drive me, I was stuck.

That’s why a recent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast hit so close to home. In the podcast episode, host Roman Mars and reporter Henry Grabar discuss the recently-popularized Netflix show Old Enough—in which elementary school-aged Japanese children run their first errands—and why the children on the show as young as two-and-a-half have so much more independence than their American counterparts.

Despite a shopkeeper helping kids get products from shelves they can’t reach and the existence of social routines like the walking school bus, the real difference-maker is the built environment—the design of the sidewalks and streets, and the layout and shape of the buildings and how they relate to the streets and public spaces—and the kind of lifestyle that these choices make possible. Whereas my elementary school, friends’ houses, and nearest grocery stores were miles away, those destinations are a short walk away for most Japanese children. Whereas all of my destinations were only connected by wide arterial roads filled by people driving at high speeds, the tiny, young participants in Old Enough navigate pedestrian-friendly neighborhood streets. And whereas my life to this day involves looking around parked cars to check for oncoming traffic, this show makes clear that in Japan these obstacles are less frequent. It turns out that everything which allowed my parents to drive me everywhere—high speed roads connecting all of our destinations and ample parking when we got there—is exactly what made it impossible for me to safely get anywhere without them.

This is because safety and speed are irreconcilable when cars and more vulnerable road users (like cyclists and pedestrians) are involved. The elements that make it easier to drive at a high speed—many wide lanes, fewer conflict points, sweeping corners, and less road furniture—simultaneously make walking more dangerous. These design choices present pedestrians with lengthened crossing distances, a reduced number of places to cross, and an experience that’s simply uncomfortable as cars zip by at high speed. That discomfort isn’t unfounded either; should a driver hit a pedestrian, the chance of that person dying increases exponentially with the faster the vehicle is going. As any kid, but especially one who’s just dodged a speeding car on the way to school, can tell you, road design is pretty elementary.

*A child crosses a short intersection in Japan in the cold open of* Old Enough season one.

This means that the cost of this tradeoff—safety for speed, vehicular convenience for pedestrian exclusion—is not simply the lack of U.S.-based Netflix shows where five-year-olds go to grocery stores. Pedestrian fatalities have ballooned more than 50 percent over the last decade—in direct contrast to trends in nations like Japan, where they’ve decreased more than 40 percent—with the more than 75 percent increase in these traffic fatalities since 2009 disproportionately impacting Black and Native Americans. Furthermore, this bloodshed is highly concentrated; urban arterials make up just 15 percent of the road network, but are the site of nearly 70 percent of deaths from traffic violence. This makes it clear that an American version of Old Enough doesn’t exist not just because of parenting choices, as some commentary focused on, but because there’s really no age where our communities are safe enough for pedestrians.

Recognizing that design is a leading contributor to traffic deaths gives us the opportunity to reduce the level of danger on our streets. We have simple yet effective tools to make everybody beyond the four doors of a car safer. These include:

narrowing vehicle lanes and turning radii to slow down drivers;
banning parking near intersections (at least) to improve visibility for all;
bumping out intersections and placing pedestrian islands in crosswalks so that crossing distances are shorter;
building a network of separated and protected bike lanes so that people on bikes aren’t mixed with those driving vehicles weighing multiple tons;
and even just ensuring sidewalks exist and are well-maintained, so that pedestrians have safe places to walk.

Making these improvements wouldn’t only mean allowing more three-year-olds to take trips to the grocery store. The design of our built environment currently limits everyone’s mobility, especially those who can’t or don’t drive, such as the elderly, visually and physically impaired, economically disadvantaged, and survivors of car crashes. Loved ones, grocery stores, social services, and economic advancement should be just as attainable without a car as they are with a car. By making our roads and streets safer for vulnerable road users—as opposed to relegating pedestrians and cyclists to solely recreational paths and trails—all of the people mentioned above are significantly freer to participate in society. Street design is more than the top vehicle speed for a given corridor; it’s a reflection of who and what activity our society prioritizes.

When I was in middle school, my family moved to a house where I could safely use my bike as transportation, at least to some of the places I wanted to go. Grocery stores and my middle school were still too far to reach, but I was suddenly able to visit friends, go to tennis courts near my house, and just ride my bike for fun. The millions of people across the country who can’t drive (or simply choose not to) can and should experience that same transformation.

New reconciliation package includes funds for safety, access

In response to the proposed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Transportation for America Director Beth Osborne released this statement:

We are glad to see Congress is taking climate needs and inflation reduction seriously. We are particularly excited that they included $3 billion in Neighborhood Access and Equity grants to redesign arterial roadways, particularly those that impact communities of color. This is a valuable, needed investment to repair a longstanding barrier to accessing jobs and services especially for non-drivers, which will support local economic development and knit communities back together across overbuilt roadways.
Huge arterial roadways become a barrier and divide communities precisely because they are not safe. Their design prioritizes high-speed vehicle travel through the corridor over all other road users, including drivers trying to cross and anyone moving through the area outside of a car. The result is an ever-growing number of pedestrians, particularly pedestrians of color, being hit and killed on our roadways. Smart Growth America’s new Dangerous by Design report documents that 67 percent of pedestrian deaths occur on arterials, which make up 15 percent of roadways. By providing funds to redesign these roadways, these grants can help to connect the community, support local economic development, save people money on gas by allowing them to get out of their cars, close an obstacle to economic opportunity and, in the process, save lives.
The role street design plays in pedestrian deaths has been overlooked for far too long. These grants are an important step to boost local economies and improve the safety of our streets. We thank Congressional leaders for including the important program in the reconciliation.

A decade of prioritizing speed over safety has led to 62 percent more deaths

Dangerous by Design 2022 from Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition

Smart Growth America’s new report Dangerous by Design 2022 uses more data than ever to understand how design impacts travel behavior. The findings confirm what we’ve always known: it’s impossible to prioritize both safety and keeping cars moving quickly.

More than 6,500 people were struck and killed while walking in 2020, an average of nearly 18 per day, and a 4.5 percent increase over 2019. Today, our colleagues at Smart Growth America released their new report, Dangerous by Design 2022, to explain why. When streets are designed for vehicle speed as the top priority, pedestrians and other road users pay the price—often with their lives

And the burden isn’t shared equally. Low-income residents, older adults, and people of color are at greatest risk of being struck and killed while walking.

People of color, particularly Native and Black Americans, are more likelty ot die while walking than any other race or ethnic group.

The Covid pandemic only heightened these issues. As driving decreased, congestion evaporated and speed increased, leading to more pedestrian deaths. Yet, at the same time, the pandemic unearthed a long-dormant demand for walking across the nation, and places with safer infrastructure saw fewer deaths.

The new Dangerous by Design report underscores the nationwide need and demand for safer streets. Read the report and join the public briefing on July 28th at 3 p.m. ET with the report authors and special guests to learn more about its findings. Register here.

This edition also includes guest supplements:

The role engineering plays in dangerous design from Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns
How to design for slower speeds and safety first from NACTO
The safety impact of vehicle design from America Walks
Why safer design is the most effective enforcement solution from Fines & Fees Justice Center

How can your community get safer?

Often, decision makers will claim that road safety is their top priority. In a recent hearing, Shawn Wilson of AASHTO said state DOTs and AASHTO are committed to doing everything they can to make roads safer. Representative Peter DeFazio asked an important follow-up question: if safety is the top priority, why are state DOTs transferring federal funds for safety (in this case, Highway Safety Improvement Program/HSIP dollars) away from safety projects?

That’s a great question from Rep. DeFazio, but we’d have a more pressing follow up: This claim that “safety is the top priority” has rung out from all states, even as pedestrian fatalities skyrocketed 62 percent up to historic highs since 2009. Why should we believe them any longer? These safety programs, while valuable, are tiny compared to the massive influx of cash into conventional road-building programs creating the safety problems in the first place. Here’s what we’d like to ask: why are we asking states to solve safety with tiny safety programs? Why isn’t our entire transportation program a safety program? How will we ever succeed using a million dollars to solve a problem being created every day by a billion?

This passage in the report (p. 28) gets to the heart of why we allocate historic amounts of money to infrastructure and only see the problem getting worse:

There are plenty of examples of successful safety improvements that have reduced fatalities on specific corridors within many of these largest 100 metro areas. But these metro areas have built 70 years of dangerous roads to retrofit, and these improvements, while welcome and needed, are the exception and not the rule. For this reason it has failed to lead to meaningful reductions in deaths across metro areas, states, and the nation. And at the same time states and cities are improving safety on specific corridors or intersections, many are building new roads with all of the same old issues. We need a transformation in the entire system—the task is monumental, and the effort needs to be sustained for years at the scale of this enormous problem.

Fatalities are increasing not because money from tiny programs like HSIP is being transferred out. It’s happening because we don’t make safety the top priority for every dollar spent. That’s why it’s one of our three key priorities.

If road design that prioritizes speed leads to more traffic fatalities, the opposite is also true. Designs that encourage slower speeds make all road users safer. Unfortunately, that’s not the status quo approach, and it’s hard to get our leaders to change their ways. The new infrastructure law could address street safety needs—if your state and local leaders are willing to make safety the priority. Learn about opportunities for safety funding on our blog.

Advocates can identify street safety needs and bring them to light. Read our recent blog on identifying infrastructure needs, even in the streets we’re most used to navigating. And visit this blog post for advice on keeping local decision makers accountable.

Dangerous by Design 2022 includes 5 key recommendations to make our streets safer. Read them in the new report.

WATCH: Safety and vehicle speed are fundamentally opposed

Sometimes we have to see it to believe it. How would street design really look if we prioritized the safety of all road users? Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition’s latest video illustrates that when streets are designed to move as many cars as possible as quickly as possible, other road users pay the price.

The number of people struck and killed by drivers increased by an astonishing amount during the pandemic, but traffic fatalities were already on the rise long before COVID-19. For years, states and localities have focused on enforcement, ineffective education campaigns, or blaming the victims of these crashes, ignoring the role of the underlying perpetrator in these deaths: roadway design.

Right now, transportation engineers tend to favor “forgiving” street design like wide, high-visibility roadways with minimal features that would slow cars down. When all streets are designed this way, drivers are lulled into a false sense of security and speed up—doing exactly what the designs are encouraging them to do. At the same time, crosswalks and other safety elements that would slow car travel are kept to a minimum, making it inherently difficult for all other road users to travel safely.

Let’s get one thing straight: this design style isn’t “forgiving” at all. The higher a vehicle’s speed, the less response time a driver will have if they make a mistake. Without stop signs and crosswalks (features that slow drivers down), pedestrians have fewer options to cross streets safely. High speeds are also more likely to result in a fatality than an injury.

Complete Streets are streets for everyone. Complete Streets is an approach to planning, designing, building, operating, and maintaining streets that enables safe access for all people who need to use them, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and transit riders of all ages and abilities.

One way to limit the risk of pedestrian fatalities is to remove pedestrians and nondrivers from the street altogether, as we do on interstates. But what about every other type of roadway, like commercial and residential streets?

In our latest video, we take a look at the design elements that enhance street safety, and you’ll notice that they all have something in common. When we install traffic signals, bike lanes, narrower lanes, and crosswalks, drivers naturally drive at slower and safer speeds.

Properly designed Complete Streets can improve safety on residential and commercial roadways. But many Complete Streets have been implemented incorrectly, cutting corners to preserve the convenience of drivers. This unfortunate trend reflects a national culture that prioritizes vehicle speed over all else, a culture that is inherently at odds with safer roadways.

If safety truly is the top priority, streets must be designed in a way that makes dangerous behavior difficult and safe behavior easy. Only then can our streets be safe for all.

VIDEO: Beth Osborne explains our broken approach to setting speed limits with WSJ

Cars going at different speeds on a road with a 35 mph speed limit

T4America director Beth Osborne joined Wall Street Journal correspondent George Downs to explain why one controversial method for setting speed limits results in higher and higher speeds.

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about the increasing danger of U.S. roadways, and recently, USDOT released their road safety strategy, which included advice for updated guidance on setting safe speeds and the 85th percentile rule. To explain why this outdated rule for setting speed limits actually leads to higher speeds, Beth Osborne sat down with George Downs. The visuals really nail it!

“A lot of people believe we say, ‘Let’s set the speed limit there and design the road around it.’ We actually do the exact reverse.”

Watch the full video below.

Read the transcript.