Law and Order on our Streets

Within the federal traffic safety system, the people are represented by two separate groups: the agencies that plan, design, and build the roads and the agencies who try to alter the behavior of people using the roads. The stories we tell about why people behave one way or another, and which of these groups is responsible for that behavior, shape our understanding of traffic safety and illustrate how we can do better than our current traffic safety crisis.

In the long-running series Law and Order, we are shown how the police and prosecutors’ work overlaps in our criminal justice system in pursuit of the same goals. In the long-running traffic safety crisis in the United States, we have two groups, but it is all too rare for them to work well together and we have conflicting stories about how to make progress.

One tale of traffic safety is that our roads are well-planned, designed, and built, but the people who use them are flawed. In this story, 94% of traffic crashes occur because flawed humans make mistakes and are distracted, intoxicated, reckless, or otherwise lawbreaking. If only we could find the right messages and the right level of enforcement in the right places, the story goes, then these flawed people who make mistakes would use our roads in the way intended by their wise designers and no crashes would ever occur. If only vehicle automation could be switched on like so many Full Self Driving Tesla subscriptions, our roads would finally be as safe as we are confident they are designed to be.

Another tale of traffic safety is that people are flawed, people inevitably make mistakes, and people are vulnerable and should not die or be seriously injured when those foreseeable mistakes occur. While improving behavior is a worthwhile goal, and critical to our shared stake in safer roads, this story goes, even with our best efforts the research will likely show that people behaved imperfectly. In this story, our roads are not awaiting the final evolution of human or robot behavior to emerge and act safely. Instead, roads should be proactively designed, and redesigned, to limit the risks caused by humans’ known and foreseeable imperfections because that is what is required to prevent deaths and serious injuries.

In the United States, where over 40,000 people died on our nation’s roads last year and where people are more likely to be killed on our roadways than in any other similarly wealthy industrialized country, we have told ourselves the first story for a long time: if only individuals would behave better, then traffic safety would be solved. Public agencies have invested billions of dollars in attempts to change behavior and people are still behaving badly. 

We are now considering the second story. The story that is told by countries that are much safer than us. The story that says people will never behave perfectly. That our responsibility to make streets safe means not just punishing a distracted driver, but designing our cars and roads so that distraction is less likely and when it occurs its impact on others is less risky.

Which story we believe impacts our way of thinking about how we should react to tragedies on our streets. And, finally, to the point at hand, these stories are reflected in our policies, programs, and performance measures for traffic safety. 

Today, let’s look specifically at performance measures.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently asked for comments on its minimum performance measures for the state highway safety grant program, which currently look at outcomes like fatalities, behaviors like seat belt use, and activities like speeding citations. NHTSA is the federal agency responsible for state transportation agencies who try to alter the behavior of people using the roads and these grants make up more than half its budget. Minimum performance measures are a relatively new phenomenon for this long-running program initially authorized in 1966 — four years before Congress established NHTSA in 1970. Minimum performance measures came about voluntarily in 2008 and then were required by Congress in 2012. At a macro level, it is hard to see their impact as traffic deaths increased by 14.6% between 2008 and 2022, bicyclist deaths increased 53.9% to the highest level ever reported by NHTSA, and pedestrian deaths increased 70.4% to 40-year highs.

So, how can we reverse our rising crisis of traffic violence? What will new or improved performance measures get us to do differently so that we see sustainable and long-term decreases in traffic deaths and our roads can be as safe as those in Canada, the United Kingdom, or Azerbaijan?

Reading between the lines of NHTSA’s questions, which focus on how performance measures can encourage the adoption of the Safe System Approach, impact programming, and diversify grantees to represent communities most impacted by traffic violence, I think I can hear them asking that. 

But, in listening to a public meeting responding to those questions I did not hear the same reflection. The strongest comments, made repeatedly, focused on how we can tell the first story of perfecting human behavior. Wondering whether the currently required longer-term 5-year averages prevent setting shorter-term, but better looking, targets. Respecting the separateness of the two groups we have long had, rather than breaking the silos that hold us back. Lamenting that traffic deaths are outside their control, but not offering a vision of how to bring the traffic safety crisis under control.

Performance measures alone will not get us to tell a new story, or crumble walls built over nearly six decades. The League’s comments call attention to the need to change our culture of two groups for traffic safety to a culture where we all work together. Where measuring the number of citations for speeding may not have as much bearing on whether people speed as the design of our roadways does. Where one demographic group being over-represented in crashes may not mean that they should be ticketed more, but may mean they should receive safer street designs. Where diversifying grants may not mean much if those grants do not serve the needs of the communities they hope to impact.

It will be a long road toward Vision Zero. Setting safety targets for higher traffic deaths will not get us there. Performance measures that ease the bureaucracy of administering grants but do not lead to change will not get us there. Getting there will require a new story about how we work together and how agencies show their journey toward a Safe System Approach in a way that is more believable and impactful than a one-year target for fewer deaths. It will require not just quantifying our existing law and order, but finding ways to measure change in our traffic safety culture.