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The Second Best Way to Get Safer Streets

Ideally, transportation planners could redesign roads to be less lethal to drivers and pedestrians. But in the real world, settling for less-than-perfect fixes can still save lives.

CityLab

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A police recruit practices traffic stops outside the San Francisco Police Academy in San Francisco in 2023. Small changes to traffic enforcement policy could have big effects on road safety. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Transportation policy has not been short on big ideas. Whether the topic is congestion, emissions or equity, researchers and policymakers have formulated thousands of ambitious plans over the years. Some have even been trialed or implemented in full. One stubborn constraint is that most good ideas are not designed to pass through the eye of the relevant needle at scale. For example, our mechanisms of regulating land use and transportation leave a great deal to local discretion, which means reform efforts tend to provoke a fatal reaction from key veto-holders —transportation regulators, legislatures, courts, and hyper-participatory and unrepresentative factions of residents who are savvy in the ways of municipal government — that are structurally biased against changes.

This bias is too deeply embedded to be just voted out of office: What is needed are ideas that can succeed not by overcoming this barrier, but by sidestepping it.

Nowhere is the need felt more acutely than in transportation safety. Americans face a substantially elevated risk of death or serious injury on our roads relative to residents of peer countries, and roadway mortality has been on the rise. In 2022, US roadways claimed nearly 43,000 lives, the highest number since 2005 and about 10,000 more than in 2010. Worse, the 2010s saw the onset of a pedestrian safety crisis, with pedestrian fatalities rising 46% that decade.

Enter the theory of the second-best. In simplified form, second-best interventions are designed to reach for the best policy that can be achieved quickly. This idea, which emphasizes low-hanging fruit, borrows primarily not from law (my field) butfromeconomics. If a policy requires successfully reconfiguring fundamental political dynamics, for example, it cannot meet this standard. Second-best interventions are built to yield the highest expected value not in a vacuum but after accounting for predictable obstacles and delays.

A focus on the second-best is not to suggest that “ bigger,” optimal ideas to advance safety and other purposes of transportation policy are not necessary. But we also need to develop a sense of the minimum changes that could be implemented relatively easily and quickly, avoiding the policy bottlenecks that have bedeviled past interventions.

Prioritize Pedestrians

US pedestrian deaths surged 54% between 2010 and 2021 and the rate has remained elevated. Transportation policy reformers have suggested countless changes to street design, speed limits and land use that would improve pedestrian welfare, but precisely because they have focused on transforming the street into a livable public space (a big lift!), they have sometimes overlooked more narrowly targeted solutions.

Take bollards, for example. For years, we have had sidewalk infrastructure that directly protects drivers and passengers from vehicle impact, like signposts that break away upon collision. But there is a puzzling absence of similar protections for pedestrians.

Bollards and similar low-tech protective devices can provide that first line of defense (as documented humorously, if not scientifically, by this dedicated Twitter account). Designs vary — these can be everything from sleek steel posts to greenery-filled planters to creatively repurposed objects. (After the Battle of Trafalgar, the Brits stripped cannons from French ships and used them as bollards in London’s East End.) All share a simple common purpose: stop moving vehicles.

That’s made bollards increasingly common sights in front of businesses vulnerable to “ smash and grab” vehicle break-ins. The next time you pull into a 7-Eleven parking lot, ask yourself why physical objects like glass doors deserve protection from moving vehicles but pedestrians do not. In areas of high pedestrian traffic, their installation should become standard. Sited properly, bollards will not only avoid impairing the access of people with disabilities but also will increase the safety of this group, which faces a disproportionately high risk of death and injury from motorists.

One virtue of bollards (as opposed to, say, protected bike lanes) is that they demand little of drivers. Drivers need to merely stay within the street; none of the right of way need be reallocated away from vehicle travel or parking. Ultimately, they should become as common in dense urban areas as guardrails are on curves and bridges on rural roads.

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Construction workers install the first of 800 bollards on the Las Vegas Strip to help protect pedestrians from vehicles in 2017. Photographer: David Becker/Getty Images North America via Getty Images

Another basic infrastructure tweak with a big safety payoff: better streetlights. Four out of five fatal pedestrian collisions take place outside of daylight conditions — in darkness, at dusk, or at dawn. Many factors beyond lighting contribute to this statistic, but better illumination would help.

Increase Seat Belt Use

Seat belts were among the earliest safety equipment to be required in cars. Their effectiveness is well established. However, more than a half century after the US first required that all new cars have seat belts, many drivers and passengers ignore them: In 2020, unbuckled vehicle occupants accounted for nearly half of all vehicle occupant fatalities in the US. Those killed when not wearing seat belts skew young — among young adults (ages 18 to 34), an above-average share of fatalities (60%) was among the unrestrained. Among other things, this means failure to use seat belts contributes disproportionately to the low average life expectancy in the US compared to our peer nations.

A simple enforcement change could improve compliance rates. Many states do not permit police officers to stop drivers merely for not wearing a seat belt, known as “primary enforcement,” but rather require that some other traffic offense be the source of a violation before a ticket can be issued for the secondary violation of failure to wear a seat belt. Some studies indicate that switching seat belt enforcement from secondary to primary may increase compliance by double-digit percentage points.

Target Outlier Behavior, Not the Mainstream

Personal responsibility has received a bad rap in transportation safety circles because for decades it was (and often continues to be) used as an excuse for policy inaction. (See, for example, the safety campaigns that blame pedestrians for using smartphones or wearing dark clothing.) There’s some danger that we’ve overcorrected, however. The intuition behind the approach that has supplanted personal responsibility — a “ safe system” approach — is that roads designed for safety (with narrower or fewer lanes, lower speed limits, and protected bike lanes) will produce, on average, safer behavior. A mountain of evidence supports this approach, and it must be continued. But this approach does not address the behavior of outliers — namely, aggressive drivers.

Most of us don’t drive double the speed limit or run red lights, but a small minority do, and there is reason to believe this fraction causes a disproportionate share of traffic fatalities. Their conduct should be a bigger target of regulation. The outsize role of aggressive drivers was laid bare during the pandemic, but extreme speeding and other reckless driving behaviors have persisted even though roads are no longer empty. “Nudges” such as street design (or, for that matter, automatic 401(k) investments) are intended to change the default behavior of the typical person, not the behavior of determined renegades.

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The aftermath of a fatal crash in NYC from February. Speeding and reckless driving rates haves remained elevated across the US. Photo by Theodore Parisienne for NY Daily News via Getty Images

The threat of outlier behavior comes into focus when considering how it interacts with other inputs into transportation safety. Because US law, culture, and infrastructure all favor driving larger and heavier vehicles over longer distances at higher speeds, we can expect more people to engage in behavior that is reckless.

Further, it is more straightforward to craft interventions that leave the responsible majority alone and target the reckless minority. Studiesshowmuch of this can be accomplished through automatedenforcement, which also reduces friction between police and motorists.

Policy Changes That Pay Double

Precisely because some of the fundamental challenges of transportation safety are deeply rooted, it can be productive to focus on attacking the structures that lock them in place at the same time as improving safety in its own right.

For example, speeding and impaired driving all contribute to a huge proportion of vehicle deaths. We need to get more creative in cracking down on these behaviors. An experiment in Sweden that awarded some speeding fine revenue to non-speeding drivers yielded promising results, for example. At the same time as they pay their car registration, drivers could also be required to buy a modestly priced bond (say, $100) that would be refunded to them the following year or rolled over if they had no violations for speeding or impaired driving. They could even be paid a generous annual interest rate (say, 10%), with the interest supplied by forfeited bonds.

The immediate purpose of these programs would be to increase safety. But they would also have the benefit of differentiating the minority of drivers who engage in high-risk behavior from the responsible majority.

Even taken all together, the proposals above are no substitute for more systemic and ambitious solutions like redesigning roads for safety, properly funding and administering public transit, mandating safer vehicle design and technology and addressing cultural and legal impediments to the reform of our transportation system. Although second-best, they are real solutions, and they can be implemented with far less friction than many that are superior in theory.

This piece was adapted from “Transportation Safety in a Second-Best Environment,” published by the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies.

Gregory H. Shill is a professor of law at the University of Iowa College of Law and affiliated faculty in the university’s engineering and business schools. He specializes in transportation law and policy.

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This post originally appeared on CityLab and was published May 2, 2024. This article is republished here with permission.

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