street design Archives - Transportation For America

“Short-term action, long-term change”: How quick builds are bringing innovation to safe streets implementation

Quick-build projects prioritize affordable, rapid, and temporary solutions to inaccessible and unsafe streetscape conditions. Through this approach to project implementation, communities are able to set an example that establishes the need and precedent for continued change in their urban environment.

What are quick builds?

Smart Growth America has a variety of resources on how quick builds develop and what they can achieve. Access them here.

In recent years, the practice of installing rapid, low-cost, and temporary improvements to public space has gained popularity. These initiatives, often called “tactical urbanism” or “quick builds” emphasize action, prioritizing short-term projects designed to improve street safety, public spaces, and enjoyability of the streetscape for all users.

There are many groups around the country utilizing quick builds in their communities, and all share a common goal of using low-cost materials to experiment with and gather input on potential design changes. While quick builds can create impressive changes to spaces, their real power lies in illustrating what works, what doesn’t, and what our urban spaces should look like.

Quick-build projects may look and work very differently depending upon the community’s needs; however, the approach remains similar. These initiatives work in the gray area, opting to avoid bureaucratic processes or expensive materials which delay changes to public spaces. They’re especially useful when a community needs to inspire action because it draws attention to perceived shortcomings, widens public engagement, deepens understanding, gathers data, encourages people to work together, and tests solutions.

Smart Growth America has been integrating quick builds into their Complete Streets initiatives through technical assistance projects across the country, testing new street designs and innovating best practices. In November 2022, Smart Growth America launched their most recent Complete Streets Leadership Academy (CSLA), a series of virtual sessions and in-person workshops designed to support community-led quick-build projects on state-owned roads. One of the goals of these projects was to strengthen relationships between state DOTs and local jurisdictions to help pave the way for further change.

Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia’s book, Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change, illustrates examples of how the approach can be utilized and includes a toolkit to guide project planning and implementation. According to the guide, any initiative utilizing Tactical Urbanism should consist of three main principles: safety enhancement, ability to adapt across project implementation, and constant innovation.

side-by-side photos of Times Square before and after the pedestrian plaza was installed. On the left, cars travel down a busy throughway near a wide sidewalk. On the right, the entire space is filled with people sitting under red umbrellas or walking to nearby businesses. — *Before and after image of pedestrian infrastructure added in NYC. (Flickr, New York City Department of Transportation)*

Small actions lead to big changes across the nation

Projects like quick builds have been utilized to make significant changes to urban spaces since the early 2000s. Former New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, has stated that a rapid quick-build-style approach was key to her work in New York City from 2007-2013. Sadik-Khan’s initiatives during the time included the implementation of 400 bike lanes, the launch of CitiBike, the building of 60 pedestrian plazas, and, most notably, the closure of car access on Broadway through Times Square.

The projects utilized quick-build approaches such as rapid implementation and the use of impermanent materials, and with support from leadership and funding to back them up, the eventual development of these initiatives into permanent structures points to quick build projects’ ability to push design changes across the finish line. The precedent set by Sadik-Khan has changed the way the country thinks about transportation, an impact we can see across the nation as multi-modal transportation initiatives expand.

With innovation and adaptation as key principles in these temporary and low-cost projects, it’s no surprise that the advocacy strategies for the approach have evolved over time. One example of this is the work of Vignesh Swaminathan, known on TikTok as Mr. Barricade. Not only have his short social media videos inspired and educated people around the world, but his work as a consultant put more quick builds into practice.

In 2019, Swaminathan worked with the City of San Jose, California to lay ten-miles of temporary protected bike lanes. Swaminathan helped the city save on the installation by coordinating lane installations with planned repavings and the use of plastic vertical bollards and bus stop islands. The city eventually plans to replace the plastic barriers with concrete islands, making the lanes permanent.

Colorful paint along a curb leads to a concrete curb extension in this before and after photo. — *At the corner of Church and Center, a temporary project turns led to permanent intersection improvements. (City of Fayetteville, AR)*

Shaping progress with community engagement

Some government leaders are using temporary, low-cost projects to put power into people’s hands. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, the city government has created an online application for citizens to gain approval for projects which will ultimately influence the city’s planning and development. The city has also developed a guide to community-led tactical urbanism which helps residents plan and implement projects. If government entities want to have an impactful role in urban infrastructure evolution, they can’t act alone—these processes require mutual trust, community buy-in, and participatory community feedback.

When government officials, practitioners, and community members come together to reap the benefits of quick builds, the practice can bring multimodal streetscapes to life. This provides an opportunity to test the effectiveness and popularity of design changes. Quick builds offer a mechanism to make small short-term safety improvements again and again, teaching us how to make our streets safer in the long term, too.

Repealing jaywalking laws to refocus on street design

Washington could be the next state to repeal jaywalking laws. While the repeal could address racial and social justice issues, the effort could also lead the conversation toward more just and safe street design.

*Photo by Steve Davis from Dangerous by Design 2022*

One of the intersections of transportation safety and social justice is how we structure our safety strategy with an emphasis on victim-blaming. American transportation planners and engineers have built roadways that mix high-speed traffic with turning vehicles and people walking and biking, killing thousands of people every year. Meanwhile, collision reports focus on whether the person killed while walking or biking was wearing reflective clothing or a helmet, and police clamp down hard on people “jaywalking” without paying significant attention to street design.

Kansas City and several states (Virginia, Nevada, and California) have taken steps to decriminalize jaywalking, and this year advocates in Washington State are ramping up to follow suit. A coalition of groups called “Free to Walk Washington” has worked with the state legislature to get companion bills introduced in both the house and senate in-effect repealing state and local jaywalking laws across the state.

While safe street design is the primary way to improve transportation safety, jaywalking laws couldn’t hurt, right? Wrong. It turns out that jaywalking laws are problematic in a few ways. Besides being ineffective at improving safety, jaywalking laws are frequently enforced disproportionately on Black and brown people, in some cases leading to well-known stories of violence. In Seattle, more than one quarter of jaywalking citations (2010-2016) went to Black pedestrians who make up only 7 percent of the population. And with government budgets stretched thin, enforcing jaywalking laws is an inefficient use of limited police resources.

In a press release announcing introduction of the senate bill, the bill’s sponsor Senator Rebecca Saldaña said, “While jaywalking laws may appear well-intended, they don’t actually keep pedestrians safe and may instead put them at risk. National data shows that jaywalking laws are disproportionately enforced against Black people and in neighborhoods lacking infrastructure and resources. Our streets and right of ways need to have the safety of all users built into the infrastructure.”

The first three states to decriminalize jaywalking have each taken slightly different approaches. Virginia’s law prohibits police from stopping someone just for jaywalking. Nevada’s law reduced the severity of a jaywalking infraction, making it no longer a misdemeanor. California’s law allows pedestrians to cross the street at places other than an intersection as long as it is safe to do so. Washington’s law as currently proposed would go much further, essentially making walking across the street legal in the vast majority of situations, as long as it is safe to do so, and preempting local jaywalking laws.

The concept of jaywalking was originally advanced by automobile manufacturers in the 1920s to shift the responsibility for safety on city streets from the automobile driver to the pedestrian, thus carving out street space for motorists to drive at higher speeds on city streets. Since then, jaywalking laws have become ubiquitous until the last few years.

Unfortunately, the injustice wrought by jaywalking laws is compounded by the injustice of thousands killed while walking. Smart Growth America’s 2022 Dangerous by Design report found that people of color, and particularly Native and Black Americans, are far more likely to die while walking on America’s dangerous streets.

Planners and engineers need to design streets for people first. That means designs that compel people to drive more slowly since the risk of killing a pedestrian drops significantly as speed drops. Narrow lanes, frequent intersections, and edge features like street trees and bollards tend to cause drivers to go slower. Protected sidewalks, and crosswalks in the places where pedestrians want to cross (at bus stops, for example) create safe space for people walking or rolling.

What final form the Washington law takes and whether it passes remains to be seen. We’ll be watching to see what happens in this state and others. And most importantly, we’ll be watching to see if all of these states can rethink the dangerous high-speed street designs that kill so many.

WATCH: Safety and vehicle speed are fundamentally opposed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the full video below.

Read the transcript.

Behind the scenes on the rise in pedestrian and cyclist fatalities and injuries

Driver expectations, higher speeds resulting from less congestion, major gaps in infrastructure, and a systemic criminalization of pedestrian and cyclist traffic on the road have contributed to the alarming, record increases in the deaths of people struck and killed while walking or biking, according to researchers.

*Crash at Lincoln Park and Barbee in Lincoln Heights. Photo by Umberto Brayj via Flickr.*

Whether for recreation or simply to get from point A to point B, Americans have been walking and biking more, and thanks to COVID-19, this pattern has only intensified.

As more people walk and bike, we’ve also seen a historic increase in the numbers of people struck and injured or killed by vehicles while walking or biking. Researchers have been delving into this worrisome trend and the factors that may be contributing to this pattern, and at the same time, municipalities are rethinking their roadway safety or Vision Zero strategies.

Photo on left: An open street in Georgia. Photo by Joe Flood via Flickr.

Research out of the University of Toronto highlighted a worrisome trend of drivers failing to acknowledge cyclists or pedestrians, especially at turns and intersections. “The results were quite surprising,” said Professor Birsen Donmez. “We didn’t expect this level of attention failure, especially since we selected a group that are considered to be a low crash-risk age group…. Drivers need to be more cautious, making over-the-shoulder checks, and doing it more often…. The takeaway for pedestrians and cyclists: drivers aren’t seeing you.”

They go on to postulate that there is an increased intensity and diversity of demands for drivers’ attention, including signage, diverse modes of transport and their evolving technology, and the presence of more cyclists and pedestrians. (Others have noted that the increase in deaths was coupled with increases in speed overall during the first half of the pandemic as streets emptied out, showing the connection between speed and greater numbers of deaths.) This demand for attention is at odds with the complacency of drivers, many of whom are not accustomed to having to worry about pedestrians and cyclists, and now they’re struggling to adjust. Making matters worse, the pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure that could clue drivers into the need to make room on the road is inconsistent, making it harder (not easier) for drivers to recognize when they’re sharing the road.

The need for consistent pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure is a twofold problem. One, roadway design and transportation policy makes safety and convenience for cyclists and pedestrians secondary to the auto, and at times, normal cyclist and pedestrian behavior is deemed outright illegal, according to Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic: “In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers’ job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them…. But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.”

This encourages false assumptions about what belongs and what doesn’t belong on our roadways; as if streets aren’t meant to be shared with other users. If drivers assume pedestrians and cyclists shouldn’t be in the road, they’re less likely to be on their guard.

Image on left: An anti-jaywalking poster created in 1937. From Wikimedia Commons.

Secondarily, according to research by J. M. Barajas‘, the existing engineering, education and enforcement approaches to Vision Zero do not address the root of the issue with pedestrian and cyclist traffic fatalities that are overrepresented by people of color. This disproportionate impact is the result of a failure to invest in safe bike and pedestrian accommodations in marginalized communities.

Simply adding bike lanes and sidewalks won’t be enough. Safety from crime is another issue of concern for people of color, who often opt to travel on higher visibility corridors, which is where bike lanes and sidewalks are rarely considered because of the impact on the traffic engineers’ sacred cow of vehicle speed. Instead, this necessary infrastructure is more commonly placed on low-volume roadways, which have less public visibility. And for those who do bike, they are subject to police harassment, as cops are more likely to stop Black cyclists than white cyclists.

Since the spike in traffic deaths during the pandemic, pedestrian and cyclist fatalities are getting more visibility. The way we respond to this issue matters. Will we continue to push for only more ineffectual traffic enforcement, which disproportionately harms people of color? Will states and localities continue to push education campaigns that do nothing to address the root causes of driver inattention? Will we finally address unsafe designs as a primary culprit? Under the infrastructure bill, we could easily turn up the dial on these failing approaches and claim progress, even as fatalities continue to worsen.

What pedestrians and cyclists really need isn’t more tickets for jaywalking or lectures about wearing reflective gear. They need infrastructure that consistently makes room for them, prioritizes their safety and comfort above vehicle speed, and that provides greater visibility for all road users when they do mix with traffic, so that when drivers need to share the road, it doesn’t come as a surprise.

Safety over speed week: Slip lanes would never exist if we prioritized safety over speed

A specific design feature on our roadways is the quintessential embodiment of what happens when speed is the #1 priority and safety becomes secondary. Slip lanes, those short turning lanes at intersections that allow vehicles to turn right without slowing down, are incredibly dangerous for people walking. Yet states & cities keep building them. Why?

Slip lanes by Taras Grescoe on Twitter

It’s “safety over speed” week here at T4America, where we are spending the week unpacking our second of three principles for transportation investment. Read more about those principles and if you’re new to T4America, you can sign up for email here.

Any traffic engineer or transportation official would surely tell you that safety, if not the most important consideration, is truly a core priority. But embedded deeply in our federal transportation program is another guiding principle that stands in direct opposition to safety: “Cars need to always move fast and never slow down.” Whatever the stated priorities are, this hidden prerequisite makes every other goal a nearly impossible task—especially safety.

Slip lanes on roads and streets are emblematic of what it looks like in practice to sacrifice safety on the altar of speed, where this underlying goal of “keep cars moving fast at all times” runs counter to the goal of “keep everyone safe while moving from A to B”—even if you say that safety is important. If we truly prioritize safety, as T4America is suggesting in our second principle, we would never build a slip lane on a local street again. ¹

What are slip lanes and why do they exist?

It’s important to remember that slip lanes were created to solve one specific set of problems: vehicle speed and delay.

They were borne of the simple realization by traffic engineers that cars turning right—even on a green light—can produce dreaded congestion because slowing down to a safe turning speed can delay traffic traveling straight. So to solve this one problem, they started adding lanes that allow traffic to make right turns without being required to slow or come to a stop, often accompanied with an additional lane on the approach or the exit. Whether you live in a rural, urban or suburban area, this feature isn’t hard to find: they’re a regular feature in most environments that were designed and built with federal money and guidance over the last 50 years.

Safety was always at best a secondary consideration, though it really wasn’t considered much at all for decades as traffic engineers started adding slip lanes to road projects all over the country.

Slip lanes are dangerous because they prioritize vehicle speed over the safety of everyone who needs to use the road

Slip lanes increase the distance that people have to cover to cross a street, put people into spots that are often the hardest for drivers to see, and encourage drivers not to slow down when approaching an intersection and a crosswalk—the precise moment they should be the most careful. This slip lane I saw in N. Fulton County, Georgia earlier this summer is a pretty typical design.

Traveling east on N. Hembree Road (with a speed limit of 40 mph!), if a driver is planning to turn right here and sees the green light ahead, all the design cues are directing the driver to blaze through the right turn onto Alpharetta Highway without slowing down. That driver could be hitting maximum speed right as they reach the crosswalk across the slip lane—exactly the spot where engineers have said that a pedestrian should “safely” cross this street.

I saw a woman crossing here and I was astonished to see that in the time that it took her to take just three steps from the middle of the street towards safety, a minivan goes from entirely out of the frame to just 10 feet away from her.

Because slip lanes were borne of the sole focus on avoiding vehicle delay, all efforts to make them “safer” will be limited. Safety is not why they exist. Even the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) knows they are inherently unsafe—it’s astonishing to read their guidance for making them, in their words, “less problematic”:

Intersections should be designed to accommodate safe pedestrian crossings using tight curb radii, shorter crossing distances, and other tools as described in this document. While right-turn slip lanes are generally a negative facility from the pedestrian perspective due to the emphasis on easy and fast vehicle travel, they can be designed to be less problematic.

How are slip lanes emblematic of safety losing out to the ultimate priority of speed?

Here’s an intersection in Minneapolis with slip lanes on all four sides. These don’t exist primarily to make anyone safe—safety is an add-on consideration to the primary desire to keep cars moving as fast as possible through this intersection. Those crosswalks and pedestrian “islands” that you see aren’t designed to get anyone across this street in the safest way possible, they are a half-hearted attempt to make the best of a road designed explicitly to keep cars moving quickly above all else.

Making the experience for people walking on a “negative facility…to be less problematic,” is a pretty interesting choice of words to describe a deadly design feature at a time when pedestrian fatalities are hitting numbers not seen since 1990. But we keep building them because moving vehicles quickly and without delay is the outcome we care about above all others.

What prioritizing safety over speed would look like

As we say in our second principle, local and arterial roads must be designed to put safety first. Protecting the safety of all people who use the street must be a priority reflected in the decisions we make about how to fund, design, operate, maintain, and measure the success of our roads. The next surface transportation law must make safety a priority and start to undo the damage wrought by decades of federal design guidelines and billions in federal transportation dollars.

So what would this look like in practice? This small change in Arlington, Virginia is a great example.

This is a minor collector road that runs largely through a residential neighborhood—not too far from the future home of Amazon’s second HQ. This slip lane made it possible for drivers to whiz into the neighborhood street without so much as a tap on the brakes. Look down the street and what do you see right after cars have sped through the gentle right turn? A crosswalk. That’s what it looked like back in 2009, but here’s what it looks like today:

The lanes were narrowed, the slip lane was eliminated, the right turn was converted into a sharper turn that requires drivers to slow down before turning, and the crosswalk was moved to the safest and shortest point of the intersection where pedestrians will be the most visible. ²

It’s very possible that because cars now have to slow down to turn right, that traffic occasionally slows down on the main road. There could even be a slight back up if a few people are turning right and have to yield to someone crossing the street. But this change is exactly what it looks like in practice to prioritize safety over vehicle speed or delay.

While this small change is certainly one worth celebrating, this isn’t the standard practice of state DOTs that control the lion’s share of federal transportation funds, and speed remains their number one priority—even if they have a stated commitment to safety. This project was the result of a local county making decisions on their own and with their own funds. Most states will not change their practices unless Congress gives a guiding directive that the lives of the 40,000 people who die as a result of traffic fatalities each year are more important than a few seconds of delay.

Access to safe, convenient transportation is a fundamental right. Today, most Americans are denied this right because their roads—not just their highways—are designed to move vehicles at the highest speeds possible, and roads are not designed for people walking, biking, or taking transit as a priority. Safety may be important, but it’s never the top priority when designing these streets.

Until we come to grips with the fact that moving cars fast at all times of day without delay is a goal that can’t always be squared with our other priorities—especially safety—and until we can admit that perhaps everyone is not going to be able to go fast all the time, we’ll continue building unnecessarily large and expensive roads where thousands of people are killed each year.

No more slip lanes. Because safety should be a primary goal of our transportation investments.

Explaining our three principles for transportation investment

Today, T4America is releasing a new set of three concrete, measurable principles for transportation investment.

Last week we explained why T4America is no longer advocating for more money for the federal transportation program and why we need a clear set of explicit goals for the federal program. Today, we’re rolling out our new principles, which are clear, simple, and measurable. You’ll find them incorporated into the “platform” section of our website and we’ll be using them to evaluate every single proposal in the months and years ahead: whether a standalone infrastructure plan or the forthcoming proposals for reauthorizing the nation’s surface transportation law that expires in 2020.

It’s time to stop spending billions with an unclear purpose for diminishing, marginal returns. We believe these three goals will help finally move us in the right direction.

#1 Prioritize maintenance

The process is inevitable as it is predictable every time the process of transportation reauthorization comes up. We’re stuck in a groundhog day with an infinite loop. Here’s how it goes:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program. And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble. And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

Our first principle is not about creating some new federal program to achieve a state of good repair. And it’s not about how much money is needed to repair our infrastructure, either. Our principle is simply a commitment to the American people that the maintenance backlog is cut in half. This would be a sea change.

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, let Congress tell us what the right target should be. But tell us exactly where we will be in addressing state of repair after this bill expires, not how much money will be spent. Until then, we believe half is right and we expect Congress to finally tie the program to their rhetoric.

#2 Design for safety over speed

When we talk about safety, we typically talk about reducing drunk driving, wearing seat belts, and wearing helmets on motorcycles. In recent years, thanks to leadership from former US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood, distracted driving was brought up to equal importance as these areas.

Yet what has been largely ignored is the role of speed itself in making our roadways completely unsafe for everyone outside of a motor vehicle. Speed isn’t always necessarily deadly. The way to make a high speed roadway safe is by separating opposing traffic; removing conflict points, like driveways and cross streets, and separating or removing cyclists and pedestrians. That’s called a limited-access highway. But we’ve tried to design for similar speeds on our arterial roadways in existing communities while retaining all the points of conflict that make those speeds deadly.

Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people who were walking on streets all across the United States, reaching levels in 2017 not seen since 1990. When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking. Our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, found in their report Dangerous by Design that most cyclist and pedestrian crashes occur on these arterial roadways in our urban and suburban areas—roads designed for high speed but without removing conflicts. If we want these roads to be safe, they either need to become limited-access highways (unlikely, expensive and damaging for the local context) or they need to be designed for lower speeds with lower speed limits.

We have to take this seriously. The NTSB issued a landmark study in 2017 about how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, and that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds. Currently we only track whether someone was driving over the speed limit. We don’t track whether the speed limit was inappropriately high. In fact, numerous local governments across the country are in arguments with states on who has the authority to lower speed limits. It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make a street appropriate for its surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds.

#3 Connect people to jobs and services by prioritizing accessibility

Fundamental to our transportation system (and the hundreds of billions of dollars we invest in it) is that it should provide people with access to jobs and services. This access is essential to an efficient economy, to ensuring that people can make a living and provide for their families, and to providing employers with reliable access to talent.

Our current federal transportation program uses a poor proxy for measuring access to jobs and services. Transportation agencies measure the speed of vehicle movement along observed portions of roadways and assume that if those vehicles can move quickly, then all trips must be smooth and short. That kind of measurement has resulted in a system that values a 40-minute commute to work in free-flowing traffic over a 20-minute commute in some congestion.

As it turns out, to make vehicles move quickly means building limited access roadways or widening roads and spreading out all destinations, making trips longer and biking or walking dangerous. So even though vehicles are traveling at high speed, people may not reach their destinations any faster because everything is more spread out. This is particularly true of pedestrians and cyclists, who once may have had to travel across short blocks, now have to cross long distances designed for cars, thanks to the limited-access changes that cut off local streets and eliminate shorter trips.

The technology has finally caught up. We can now understand, quickly and affordably, how well the transportation system connects people to the things they need. Thanks to aggregated GPS data, we can know where homes and likely destinations are located. We also have congestion data and real-time transit arrival information. With this data, we can accurately calculate how easily people can access the things that they need and how various proposed transportation investments would improve or worsen it.

Some states, particularly Virginia and Hawaii, have already started scoring potential projects under consideration for funding based on the extent to which they improve access to jobs and services. Massachusetts and Utah are investigating doing the same. Congress should follow their lead.

As Congress considers the next surface transportation policy bill, they should ensure that these destination access data are available nationwide. Congress should also update performance measures to replace 1950s proxy measures like speed of travel with accurate, updated 21st century measures. People don’t talk about the average speed of a trip: they talk about how long it took. We should evaluate transportation projects and the overall system the same way.

By the end of this next reauthorization cycle, the federal transportation program should be reoriented from a program focused on the fluidity of vehicle movement to one that prioritizes and measures access to jobs and services.

Go more in-depth on our principles here, and read our specific policy proposals for reauthorization here.