Beyond Band-Aids: rethinking road safety from the ground up
UNM civil engineer Nick Ferenchak says the road-safety conversation is missing a key element: what if we had fewer cars on the road?
After years of constant reminders that “road safety is a shared responsibility,” and the more recent “slodwn/bklup” billboards, New Mexico still has one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates in the country. People are dying while walking to the bus stop, biking home from work, or just trying to get across the street. After a decade of road carnage, a problem this entrenched can start to feel permanent—more like an unchangeable feature of the landscape than a failure of policy.
Nick Ferenchak aims to change that view. Ferenchak is an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of New Mexico and the director of the Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety—the first university transportation center focused specifically on pedestrians and cyclists. Part of his work focuses on arterials, the wide, high-speed roads designed to move large volumes of traffic.1 In practice, these are the multi-lane corridors whose long distances between crosswalks make mid-block crossings both common and dangerous.
Ferenchak’s research shows that when we build low-density places where homes, jobs, and shops are far apart, driving becomes the only practical option. People drive more miles, at higher speeds, on roads built for throughput rather than safety.
That combination—distance and speed—is what makes crashes deadly.
We can tell people to slow down all we want. But if we’ve designed a world where they have to drive everywhere on fast roads with no realistic multimodal alternatives—no safe walking routes, no protected bike infrastructure, no broadly connected transit network—then of course billboards don’t move the needle.
Maybe, Ferenchak suggests, the path to safety is shifting our land use to provide more of the car alternatives that people already want.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: In Los Alamos, lots of people own bikes but don’t feel safe riding them. How does traffic stress affect whether people actually bike or walk?
Nick Ferenchak: We’ve looked at the stress level of different bike facilities, and lower-stress facilities are correlated with larger increases in ridership. There’s older research that basically said “build it and they will come,” but that was before protected bike lanes existed.
What we’re seeing now is that standard bike lanes do increase ridership, but protected bike lanes lead to a significantly larger increase. Across about 28 cities, with hundreds of miles of bike lanes, that trend is very clear: lower-stress facilities result in more people riding.
But the bigger piece is the network. A single protected bike lane helps, but when it’s part of a connected network, that’s when you see really large increases. Rome wasn’t built in a day. If you build your first protected bike lane, and you don’t see this huge increase in ridership? Well, that’s because you need that underlying supporting network.
Q: So a stretch of green-painted bike lane isn’t going to move the needle?
We don’t have great data on things like paint alone. We do have data, but the sample size was too small to analyze, and I don’t know of published research on it. But more broadly, small, isolated improvements aren’t going to transform behavior. You need a system people can actually use end-to-end.
Q: Let’s talk about crosswalks. We’re seeing fatalities and near misses even where nothing looks obviously wrong. What’s going on?
I’m not aware of definitive research showing whether crosswalks are more or less safe than they used to be. Often, the issue isn’t the crosswalk itself—it’s the road it’s on. In Albuquerque, Central Avenue is the really bad road. On big arterials, you can add enhancements like pedestrian hybrid beacons, and they help a little at that location.
But they don’t fully solve the corridor problem.
We studied these beacons in Albuquerque. Before installation, people were crossing mid-block. After installation, we checked whether people would go out of their way to use the safer crossing. The farthest we saw anyone walk out of their way was about 80 feet—and even then, about 90% still crossed mid-block instead. Beyond that distance, we didn’t observe anyone using the crossing.
So if your signals are spaced half a mile apart, people tend to cross where it’s convenient. That’s hard to fix with spot treatments. If we’re serious about safety on arterials, we need to slow cars down and rethink the whole design—things like road diets to slow vehicles down. With a road diet, pedestrians don’t have to cross as far. They don’t have to run across seven lanes of traffic all at once.
Q: Where do most pedestrian crashes happen? Crosswalks, or mid-block?
Most pedestrian crashes are happening mid-block, often at unmarked locations.
Q: You’ve argued that land use decisions are connected to traffic safety. How does a zoning decision today lead to a crash years later?
From a transportation perspective, higher-density, mixed-use development tends to produce shorter trips. Shorter trips are generally slower, and slower travel is associated with safer outcomes.
But I think one thing that the Safe Systems approach misses is mode shift. How effective is reducing the number of cars on our streets in terms of improving safety?
Right now, we design systems assuming basically 100% of people will drive. Then we ask, how do we make that safe? But another question is: how do we build places where maybe only 75% of people are driving?
That’s where land use comes in. You can design a great street, but if all the housing is far away, no one is biking or walking. In Albuquerque, example, all of the new housing is going up 15 miles away from downtown. You can put a protected bike lane out to those houses, but if it’s 15 miles away, nobody’s going to use it. The land use has already determined the outcome.
Q: Isn’t this a real blind spot in transit and housing conversations?
I think it is. A lot of the conversation on road safety focuses on speed reduction and conflict management, but it assumes the same number of cars. We don’t spend as much time asking what happens if there are fewer cars in the first place.
Q: You’ve also found that some dangerous streets don’t show up on crash maps at all. How is that possible?
Because nobody uses them.
We’ve done work estimating demand based on land use—say, a neighborhood with a thousand kids and a nearby school. There should be a lot of walking and biking there. But if there’s a seven-lane arterial in between, that demand gets suppressed.
We surveyed parents and asked, ‘Would you allow your kid to walk on a road that looks like this?’ On a dangerous arterial near homes and schools, 90% of parents said they would not allow their kid to walk or bike on that road. There are some really nasty arterials where 100% said no—but if those roads are far from homes and schools, there’s no meaningful suppression, because nobody had a reason to walk there in the first place. The suppression that matters is when a dangerous road sits between people and somewhere they actually need to go.
So the crash data only shows you where people are getting hit. It doesn’t show you where people feel so unsafe that they don’t even try.
Q: Has this approach to mapping suppressed demand caught on with cities?
Not really. We’ve helped maybe two cities develop a map of that suppression, but I don’t know of any city that has institutionalized that kind of proactive thinking. Part of the reason is that there are already so many crashes out there—so many pedestrians and bicyclists being killed—that it would be a lifetime of work just focusing on where people are being hit and killed. And then we come in and say, “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg—there are roads so dangerous that nobody is even out there walking and biking, so the crashes aren’t showing up at all.” Cities kind of roll their eyes at us, like, “We’ve already got our hands full.”
Q: For cities that are already built around wide, high-speed roads, what’s the most effective short-term fix?
Most of the problem is on arterials, and traditional traffic calming doesn’t really work there. That’s why cities struggle.
One approach is to make those roads more multimodal—take a lane away from cars and give it to buses or bikes. That’s what happened with bus rapid transit on Central Avenue in Albuquerque. The bus lane effectively acted as a road diet: it narrowed the space available to cars, reducing speeds by around 10-15% even though the posted limit never changed.
So you’re slowing traffic through design, not just signs—and at the same time, you’re giving people other ways to get around.
Q: Do speed limits matter?
They matter, but they’re not the main lever. Drivers tend to respond to the design of the road more than the posted number.
If a road feels like you can safely drive 45, people will do that even if the sign says 35. Lowering the sign alone might get you a small benefit, but it’s not the long-term solution.
Q: That leads us to a deeper question: who has traffic engineering traditionally been designed for?
Sure, yes: the driver.
If you look at metrics like level of service, it’s considered unacceptable for a driver to wait 20 seconds at a light. But a pedestrian might have to walk a quarter mile to a signal, wait, cross, and walk back—that could be 10 minutes—and that’s treated as fine?
So when you look at delay, different users are living in completely different universes.
Q: And that’s baked into the system?
Yes—but I don’t want to be negative towards transportation engineers. I think most transportation engineers do get it. They’ve just inherited a very entrenched system, and they’re working on one intersection at a time within it. When 95% of people are driving, you can’t flip a switch overnight, even if you know what needs to change.
That’s why this ultimately requires political leadership. Engineers need someone to say: we’re shifting priorities here, not just optimizing within the existing framework. Without that, even engineers who get it can’t do much about it.
Q: What research are you most excited to share with the public?
I have two papers under peer review right now looking at about 280 cities across the U.S., and what we’re finding is that less auto-oriented cities are significantly safer—overall, and specifically for pedestrians and cyclists.
But the finding I’m most excited about is that they’re also safer for people in cars. Cities where 75 to 80% of people are driving to work look a lot like our European peers in terms of safety outcomes. Compare that to cities where 95% of people are driving—those are the really unsafe ones.
So building places that are good for walking, biking, and transit isn’t just good for people walking, biking, and taking transit. It’s also good for people still in their cars.
That has pretty significant land use implications. It’s not really about putting a crosswalk down in the middle of a dangerous corridor—Central Avenue still isn’t walkable or bikeable if you do that. The problem goes much deeper. We need people thinking about safety differently, instead of just putting Band-Aids on arterial roads.
See Nick Ferenchak’s Google Scholar page for more.
While this is the first time I have encountered *modal suppression*, the concept is certainly a part of the transportation discussion. This suggests to me an opportunity for introductions and collaborations. While not a safety organization, AARP employs a modal suppression strategy. *Liveable Communities* is a program to promote land use for senior living as a means of being less car dependent. Much of this policy aims at the safety problem posed by aging drivers. I suggest looking up the closest AARP office and reaching out to them. If nothing else, they would be able to provide contacts in the DC office. Transportation For America is also friendly to modal suppression. Any non-profit promoting active transportation uses this angle. This is an opportunity for collaboration.