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Tag: safety over speed

Letter to Congress calls for penalties for failing to improve roadway safety

Nearly 40,000 people are dying on our roads each year, and Congress must take action to address the crisis by requiring changes in policy and practice. Last week, the National Complete Streets Coalition, Transportation for America, and a coalition of 24 other national, state, and local organizations sent a letter to Congress, calling on them to immediately address safety in road design instead of letting thousands more die year after year.

Since the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was passed in 2021, roughly an average of 40,000 people have died per year on U.S. roads. If the trend continues, over 200,000 people will die over the course of the next five-year surface transportation reauthorization bill. The federal government has a fundamental duty to protect those who are getting killed everyday and they cannot wait until this transportation bill expires (or later) to address the roadway safety crisis. That’s why we wrote a letter calling on Congress to hold hearings on improving federal roadway design standards to prioritize safety for all roadway users, change the federal roadway design standards based on the lessons learned from those hearings, and penalize state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations that fail to improve safety.

Federal roadway design standards favor the speed of cars over the safety of everyone using the roadway, leading to a 40-year high in people killed while walking and biking, and higher roadway deaths per billion vehicle kilometers traveled than any of our peer nations. The federal government provides hundreds of millions of dollars each year to state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations which they then use to build dangerous roads constructed using roadway design standards that favor car speeds over regularly-placed crosswalks, daylighted intersections, and protected bike infrastructure. When more and more people walking and biking die on these federally funded roads, the government levies zero consequences against the main culprits, state DOTs and MPOs. Congress will try and pass a new “traditional” transportation bill by next year, a supposed “return to basics.” However, our traditional methods of funding transportation have resulted in congestion, crumbling roads, and a record number of lives lost. The U.S. cannot afford to continue with business as usual. Congress needs to hold hearings and learn from experts about road design that protects all road users, alter road design recommendations in response to what they learn, and restrict funding to states and MPOs who exacerbate the roadway safety crisis.

In a letter sent to Congress last week, we proposed three concrete actions for Congress and USDOT to take. You can read them in full in the letter, but they are:

1. Prioritize safety in all road design guidance and within the entire federal transportation program, rather than treating safety as an afterthought.

Federal roadway design guidance is inherently broken. Manuals such as the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets from AASHTO and the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices value continuous movement of cars over the safety of those both inside and outside vehicles leading to wide, high speed roads. There is no requirement that our federal roadway design standards be proven to improve safety. It is well established that speed increases the deadliness of a roadway and that safety and speed are fundamentally incompatible, yet the design manuals our federal government recommends ignore this basic truth. This creates a dangerous environment for pedestrians, cyclists, people with disabilities, and those inside vehicles. Congress needs to ensure that our roadway design guidance is evidence-based, allows for innovation, and protects those who are walking, biking, and driving.

2. Require measurable improvements on safety from all funding recipients—with penalties for failing to perform.

Congress funneled historic amounts of money to state DOTs and MPOs in the IIJA with big promises to improve roadway safety, however those results have yet to be seen. Congress cannot continue to dole out millions without any enforceable targets, therefore Congress should tie funding to outcomes, including safety. Congress must call on these states to answer for the disappointing outcomes resulting from federal funds. If states and metropolitan planning organizations fail to meaningfully decrease the number of people dying while walking and biking on their roadways, Congress should limit their funds to programs that improve safety and repair rather than allow them to burn millions on dangerous new or expanded roads.

3. Hold hearings in the House and Senate focused specifically on how road design contributes to the roadway safety crisis and holds the key to solving it.

Reauthorization in 2026 represents our best opportunity to orient federal policy and spending toward improving safety. But we need to lay the groundwork for that bill now. Congress must hold additional hearings focused specifically on the ways road design contributes to the roadway safety crisis, why we are failing at all levels to implement safer designs, and how Congress can actively help address this crisis. They need to quickly gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between roadway design and poor safety outcomes, successful interventions to address roadway safety through design best practices, and why states repeatedly fail to implement safe road design. They must call for the best roadway design practices from at home and abroad to be more widely implemented and recognize the roadway safety crisis as a public health emergency. Congress cannot spend the next year writing a transportation bill that fails to address dangerous roadway design and its contribution to the roadway safety crisis. They need to go beyond public support for safety and show their commitment by working with experts to problem solve and address the fundamental issue of flawed roadway design through legislation and appropriations.

Congress cannot ignore the catastrophe they’ve helped create. They need to listen to the local, state, and national voices that are demanding they use their legislative authority, act now, and save lives.

Reforming state transportation plans to make safety the priority

Finding and deciphering the lists of transportation projects planned by states and metropolitan planning organizations are nearly impossible for the average person. The plans they do have often involve making roads faster and more dangerous and the goals they have are divorced from a supposed priority of safety. These plans need to be transparent and easily understandable so that the public can understand how projects advance transportation priorities.

The U.S. provides billions of dollars in block grants to state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations (MPO), but despite using public dollars, the projects seem unrelated to the USDOT’s “top priority” of safety. The DOTs and MPOs are allowed the freedom to allocate federal funding to projects they prioritize. They are required to document these projects, however in the end there is no real requirement to explain how these projects actually benefit the goals of the federal transportation program, namely safety. If we want to ensure that our program advances safety, we need to make sure that the entities receiving funding explain how their projects advance goals.

T4’s policy proposal for prioritizing safety over speed

In our second principle for reauthorization, Safety over Speed, we outline how to monitor how our states and MPOs are spending on safety:

  • Require states and MPOs to detail in their core planning documents—State Transportation Improvement Programs (STIPs for states) and Transportation Improvement Programs (TIPs for metros)—their goals for safety and clearly explain how the projects they are choosing will advance those targets for safety.
  • All approved STIPs and TIPs should be posted on the FHWA and FTA websites and be fully searchable.
  • Update benefit-cost guidance to prevent transportation agencies from claiming safety benefits in congestion reduction projects without a study that shows congestion reduction will prevent crashes that result in fatalities and serious injuries for all road users.

State DOTs and MPOs receive billions in federal funding, and they are required to assemble lists showing the projects they will advance with those funds over the next four years. These required documents, known as Statewide Transportation Improvement Programs (STIP) and Transportation Improvement Programs (TIP), have to be updated at least every four years and explain which projects are being advanced by those federal dollars. The purpose of these documents is to explain how agencies are prioritizing projects and to help the public understand where their money is going and what it is expected to achieve. They fail miserably on all counts.

To understand a STIP/TIP, you first must try to find it. For a document that is supposed to inform the public, they can be extremely difficult to locate, and nearly impossible to decipher. Each state and MPO houses these documents differently. In some cases, these documents are not even posted publicly. Once you do find a STIP or TIP, it can be a mess to decipher. These documents vary wildly in how they explain information. Some are unsearchable, 100-plus page PDFs listing projects. Most lack any meaningful explanation of why the projects are prioritized.

Image from the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization’s (Austin area) TIP that shows adding a lane will improve safety, pavement condition, and system performance.

Theoretically the projects that states or metro areas are choosing to include in these documents are supposed to improve transportation performance measures, including safety. That’s how the federal program was recalibrated back in 2012: States get lots of flexible money, but have to accomplish certain goals, like fewer roadway deaths.

But this is where this process breaks down: the process by which states and metro areas choose these projects with no real plan fails to connect to or advance any of their priorities To put it another way, a state may set a goal of reducing fatalities and injuries, and then pick a suite of projects to build over the next four years that have zero connection to actually accomplishing that goal. Afterwards, we’re all surprised when safety doesn’t improve or they miss their targets (or they hit their terrible targets).

Because the projects included in STIPs and TIPs receive federal funding, they need to be publicly available, searchable, and readable, so that taxpayers can understand both where their money is going, and what agencies are attempting to accomplish with it. Congress needs to direct USDOT to reform guidance on STIPs and TIPs so that they are housed in an easily-searchable, central database run by USDOT—all easily findable in one place. That means if someone is interested in how their state or MPO is spending money, they should be able to go to a centralized website, click on their state, and filter to find projects that are safety focused. When they explore a project, in addition to the typical information on funding sources and a general project overview, each entry should also include an explanation of how that project is going to improve the state of their system.

However, simply requiring explanations for the projects included in STIPs and TIPs won’t fix this issue. We need to change how states and metros justify their projects, especially around safety and repair. Oftentimes agencies will add a lane, claiming that it will improve the pavement condition of a roadway and improve safety. These justifications, the benefit-cost guidance, claim that congestion reduction will improve safety. In their eyes, creating less congestion creates fewer instances where cars will start and stop, leading to less minor crashes. However if congestion reduction actually reduces congestion (which is not a guarantee), it ends up speeding cars up. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, less people drove, congestion was reduced, and speeds increased, and as a result our roads grew deadlier than ever. Safety is fundamentally incompatible with speed. Faster roads increase the likelihood of deadly crashes and create a hostile environment for pedestrians. We shouldn’t be funding safety programs that actually make it more dangerous for all road users, but our safety guidance values fast roads. To prevent transportation agencies from claiming safety benefits in congestion reduction projects, we need to require them to conduct a study that shows congestion reduction will prevent crashes that result in fatalities and serious injuries for all road users. We need to stop funding congestion reduction projects with grants that should advance safety.

Conclusion

Our transportation system is supposed to serve all road users, so why should we be targeting safety dollars to projects that do not prioritize that goal? In order to make safety our priority and to have real accountability, we need to ensure that states and MPOs are choosing projects that will measurably improve safety for all roadway users. That means clearly outlining what projects they’re working on and explaining how they advance safety. Without reforming the process by which STIPs and TIPs are created and shared with the public, it will be impossible to understand what our money is going towards.

 

 

 

 

 

To truly prioritize safety, federal guidance must be grounded in evidence

Road safety is described as a top priority by transportation agencies and decision makers. However, the actions and regulations they produce often undermine this stated intention. Road design standards must be backed by concrete research to justify designs that prioritize safety ahead of speed.

T4’s policy proposal for improved safety

In our platform for reauthorization, under our first core principle of “Design for safety over speed,” we call for government agencies to “Conduct research and provide evidence-backed guidance for roadway design.” This article explains why this is critical, and some of the steps required to make it happen.

Current road design standards are NOT based on evidence and science about road safety

Roads are not naturally occurring features–they are designed and built by people. And these people are generally planners and engineers who follow certain rules and guidelines that are created by experts—particularly in the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is that while everyone seems to agree that safety is a top priority, there are numerous instances in these rules and guidance where safety clearly takes a backseat to other objectives:

The Green Book and Highway Safety Manual: The main guide used by road designers is the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets, which is published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and informally known as the “Green Book.” AASHTO also publishes the Highway Safety Manual, which focuses more specifically on safety interventions and design. Both of these are adopted by FHWA, and they are often treated as gospel by transportation officials at lower levels. Unfortunately, these documents have justified road designs that prioritize vehicle speed over safety and access for everyone else. Tragically, and all too often, transportation professionals fail to take action until after a deadly threshold has been crossed. For example, residents in the Southwest neighborhood of Washington, DC identified an intersection as extremely dangerous with scores of crashes, dozens of injuries, and two deaths in just a few years. However, the local authorities failed to take action until another pedestrian was killed there in April 2025.

Intersection at 6th and M Street SW, Washington DC.

The same story played out in San Antonio, where it took dozens of crashes and multiple deaths at a dangerous intersection before the city finally decided that a traffic light was “warranted.”

The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (MUTCD) is a massively influential publication that sets standards for numerous aspects of road signs and is frequently invoked in the design and operation of roads across the country. A clear example of using the wrong evidence and prioritizing speed over safety that has dominated the MUTCD is the infamous 85 percent rule–a ridiculous practice that reads like an Onion headline. It basically means setting or adjusting speed limits on roads based on how fast cars are already driving—rather than designing speed limits based on the context and safety needs of the street. Because the majority of drivers tend to exceed speed limits, this creates a feedback loop that pushes speed limits up and makes roads more dangerous over time. And speed is a crucial factor in determining the likelihood and severity of car crashes. Simply put, high speeds and safety are incompatible when it comes to roads, especially in complex settings where there are multiple types of road users (e.g. pedestrians, transit, bicyclists, and motorists).

With the most recent MUTCD edition and in statements about the manual, the FHWA has insisted that the 85th percentile rule is just one factor among many that should be considered when setting speed limits. However, the term appears forty-four times in the document (and even more in a recent FHWA Speed Limit Setting Handbook) and thus remains an important standard that transportation professionals will most likely continue to view as a key input for determining road speeds.

By creating or adopting design guidance that prioritizes speed over safety, the FHWA reaffirms that the status quo is acceptable and provides legal cover for local agencies who follow their designs. Such standards can result in road designs that are clearly dangerous.

Design speed vs. posted speed

Posted speed is the legal maximum limit for driving on a road, while the design speed is the speed that vehicles will actually travel based on roadway features and conditions. Ideally, these should be aligned, but often there are mismatches (e.g., roads that are designed in a way that encourages high speeds, regardless of posted speed). 

What can we do?

The federal government can play a significant role in determining the safety of our roads and should make changes to reverse the situation:

  • Require science-based standards at FHWA that prioritize the safety of all road users, including within the MUTCD and any other guidance documents. These should be updated and improved regularly based on the evidence.
  • Make clear that there is no legal shield for transportation agencies simply because they follow design standards, unless those standards are demonstrably tied to the safety of all users. Federal regulation should only include design standards that are backed by publicly available evidence showing that they reduce crashes that result in fatalities and injuries in the contexts where they’re applied.
  • Provide guidance for context-sensitive speed limits (limits that are based on surrounding road and land use, not simply driver behavior) and require the posted speed and design speed to be the same. The 85th percentile rule is NOT the only way to establish speed limits.

There are a number of alternate proposed methods, including NACTO’s approach (which aligns with MUTCD guidance). Some states, such as Florida, have taken steps to create context-sensitive street design guidance. Under the Florida system, planners and engineers must consider existing and future characteristics to ensure that roads are designed for the right vehicle speeds, road users, and trip types. But the federal government should play a more active role in guiding and supporting states and localities. The U.S. can also learn from international best practices in this domain.

If safety is our top priority, we actually need to measure it

Safety is a top stated priority for nearly every transportation agency. So why don’t we have more comprehensive up-to-date information on the danger of our roads? The limited information we do have fails to explain the scope of our safety crisis, and therefore fails to give us the information we need to address it.

We say safety is our top priority, but we do not have current national data on how many people were killed or injured, or where. The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s “yearly” report on deaths suffered in motor vehicle traffic crashes, is wildly out of date and limited. For something constantly described as our highest priority, taxpayers and policymakers are kept woefully in the dark about how bad things are, how we’re trying to address it, and whether or not those interventions are working. We will never improve safety if we don’t measure it better.

T4’s policy proposal for improved safety

In our platform for reauthorization, under our first core principle of “Design for safety over speed” we have a goal to improve the basic data on safety so we can address it. To do this we spell out two things that need to change:

  • Publish safety data, such as the Fatality Analysis Reporting System data, to the public within one year of the end of each calendar year, and expand the data to include roadway environment conditions.
  • Collect and analyze the deployment of safety countermeasures and results, updating approved countermeasures based on this information.

Three limitations of our safety data

1) There is no national dataset on injuries to people walking or rolling that is reliable, comprehensive, and current.

From the timing to the quality of it, the data we have is wholly insufficient in telling where people are getting killed and why, meaning that we can’t change what and how we build. Currently there is a 16-month lag in FARS data. If you were killed in a car crash in December 2023, it would not be published until the spring of 2025 and the data would lack critical details. The point of FARS is to provide crash data in a timely fashion so that we can address issues with our roads, but it has not served that purpose to this point. Even if this data was updated annually, it would lack critical details including road design and injuries that occurred.

FARS data comes from crash reports that are tracked independently by local police departments and compiled at the state level, all with different recording methods and organizational categories. This leads to an incomplete data set that is released later and later every year. Creating a standardized system around data collection that includes the reasons behind a crash, any injuries, and the environmental conditions could help make reporting more consistent and effective.

2) FARS data does not specifically and accurately report on serious injuries at a national scale.

The second problem with FARS is embedded right in its name and purpose: tracking fatalities. A limited number of emergency departments report injuries. Their race and ethnicity classifications can differ and they are not required to report detailed crash information. Many injuries remain unreported because they are not severe enough to warrant a hospital visit or people don’t have the means or desire to enter into the formal healthcare system. In Dangerous by Design 2024, we estimated that 67,336 people were injured in 2022. But that’s an educated guess, not concrete data. Tens of thousands of people are physically harmed by the way we design our roads, but we have no clue about the true effect. This is a policy failure that seriously hinders our ability to understand the true extent of our safety crisis.

Because this data comes from crash reports, many traffic-related injuries are not recorded if they are not “severe.” Each jurisdiction and report also has their own definition for what constitutes a severe injury, making national reporting more difficult. If someone realizes they were hurt worse than they thought and then go to the hospital later—which often happens to people biking or walking when adrenaline subsides—they are not recorded as a serious injury in a crash report. That injury is then not recorded in FARS. To understand the safety crisis on our roadways, we need to include the missing injury numbers from car crashes in our data. We also need to create guidance and standardize how we track these injuries so that injuries are tracked properly.

3) We lack a full picture of danger on our roadways

FARS fails to capture the kind of comprehensive data we need about environmental conditions, infrastructure, the design of the road or its deficiencies—not just “was a crosswalk present” but also “what was the quality of the lighting.” This means we don’t ever have good information on what is creating our most dangerous roadways.

Crash reports provide limited information about where accidents happen and what the conditions and infrastructure look like. For example, injuries that occur on poorly maintained sidewalks are not recorded at all. All serious non-fatal injuries need to be included in this data. Requiring roadway environmental conditions in crash reports will greatly improve the clarity on what we need to improve. FARS data needs to report more details about crosswalk placement and quality, roadway design speed (not just the speed limit), intersection design, lighting conditions and quality, and roadway user visibility. It also needs to include the state of the roadway repair so that we can understand how roads in poor condition affect safety.

Additionally, FARS makes it impossible to truly assess the impact on different groups of people, especially when it comes to people of different abilities. There is no ability to disaggregate people using walkers, wheelchairs, or other assistive devices from people riding skateboards, bicycles, or rollerskates. FARS data groups people with disabilities under the overarching group of “nonmotorists.” This limits our ability to actively address the fatality epidemic among the disability community, the people who most need our help in creating safe infrastructure. The label nonmotorists includes cyclists and people walking with the disability community, all of whom may have differing needs. Having a specified data set for the disability community would help the U.S. target investments to address the dangers of our roadway design for our most vulnerable communities.

With better understanding of how deaths occur, where injuries are happening, and the infrastructure conditions that are contributing to those deaths, we can better understand the crisis and target money to make changes to improve safety. Having annually updated, improved, and comprehensive crash data is the first step in solving our roadway safety crisis. Only after understanding the true extent of our problem will we be able to target real investments to improve the lives of everyone using our transportation system. We have codified safety as one of the seven national goals of the federal program. Yet we know so little about it. We cannot profess to care about a crisis we are failing to measure well. It’s past time for that to change.

Three ways quick builds can speed up safety

People add art to sidewalks along a quick build demonstration project complete with a flex post delineated bike lane and clearly marked crosswalk

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.

People add art to sidewalks along a quick build demonstration project complete with a flex post delineated bike lane and clearly marked crosswalk
A quick-build demonstration project in Chattanooga, TN, completed as part of Smart Growth America’s Complete Streets Leadership Academies.

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.

T4A's three principles for transportation funding are 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.

People cycle and walk down a green path near a transit stop.
A street in Portland, OR features a bike path, transit, and space for people walking. (Travis Estell, Flickr)

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.

A person wearing a hood and heavy coat faces a busy street filled with cars and stoplights with no way to cross

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.

A person wearing a hood and heavy coat faces a busy street filled with cars and stoplights with no way to cross
(Viktor Nikolaienko, Unsplash)

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.

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.

A cyclist travels down a busy highway on their way to Baltimore.
(Frank Warnock, Bike Delaware)

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.

A cyclist crosses an intersection with the aid of a green bicycle crossing signal
Flickr photo by Seattle DOT.

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.

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.
Flickr photo by NYCDOT

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!

An adult and small child cross the street at night without a crosswalk while cars approach

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.

An adult and small child cross the street at night without a crosswalk while cars approach

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.

A car rests just before a crosswalk on a wide roadway
A robo-taxi travels down a San Francisco street. Wikimedia Commons photo.

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.

A young woman holds onto her bicycle, waiting for the ped signal to cross a crosswalk showing signs of wear.
A cyclist waits to cross as cars zip past. Source: Flickr

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
a child stands in front of a long crosswalk
Photo by Richard Risemberg

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.