I’m late to this article, but I have to chime in to say: amen.
I worked entirely on road safety during my six years at USDOT, alongside incredibly dedicated people who are genuinely trying to advance a public-health, Safe System approach to preventing fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways.
And yet, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people give trainings on this topic who clearly don’t “get it.” Often, they don’t seem to realize how narrowly they’re focusing on individual behavior or that doing so is fundamentally at odds with what the Safe System Approach is actually about.
I am hopeful that things are starting to shift, and that more people are coming to recognize that these deaths and serious injuries are both preventable and unacceptable—and that the solution is not simply more education, enforcement, or paid media telling individuals to behave better, but systemic change by design.
Darren, thank you so much for weighing in - it is so validating to hear someone who worked for USDOT say this! I interviewed a few traffic professionals recently for background for this series and I swear there is a light behind the eyes of people who get it. And a sort of dullness where people do not. Yes, they want “safety” in the abstract, but they’re stuck in the mode that behind each crash is a personal moral failing. For a lot of people, there are no bad roads. Only bad drivers.
Love love love this article. So much. Thanks for this. Also if helpful, there’s evidence of fewer crashes and deaths after the bus lanes were installed on Central Ave. I was going to mention it in my TEDx but I figured it was maybe too soon because people were still angry about getting used to the new bus lanes! But the fatality decrease was clear.
In 2026, I plan to write and publish of history of the Dangerous by Design report, which is very narrow in scope, but aligns very well with Vision Zero advocacy in the US. It is critical that we stress vehicle design and road design as the best safety interventions since these have the best long-term outcomes for the public dollar and the public at-large does not understand this. Yet safety advocates are shooting ourselves in our foots when we overstress engineering. Culture and personal responsibility are still critical tranches of the safety problem.
I think engineering is really design-build. Traffic engineers sign off on some stuff that is counterintuitive to safety, all in the worship of level of service.
I sent Stephanie the powerpoint of a talk I gave way back in 2006, which compared the safety approach ALARA that we use in nuclear and high hazard facilities (where I worked at the time) to what we could do with traffic. It is obviously long in tooth but was a start.
The base of the safety pyramid, as Stephanie stresses, is the built environment we live in as it encourages either good or bad behavior and often, in the current paradigm, ignores risks. So designing streets to reduce crash severity and crash frequency (i.e., to minimize the destructive forces in a crash as well as reduce their frequency) by slowing things down and reducing the opportunities for high-energy crashes (e.g., replacing signalized intersections with roundabouts) is critical, but it doesn't mean we don't do anything else. It's just that we build on the pyramid. That includes building a safety culture, which is critical to ALARA, around safe systems rather than what we have today. I'd certainly include better quality driving, but not as the base of my pyramid.
The pyramid is well-ordered, but misses the first-order problems that act on the pyramid: culture and politics. These are both questions of values. These are all exogenous to the model. When drivers value maximizing speed and mobility at the expense of the extremely unlikely chance that they might kill or maim someone, these are likely nodes of cultural and political resistance to traffic safety. Someone who regulates their own driving appropriately would not object to broader safety regulation regimes. This is confirmed by the superior traffic safety results in Nordic countries, where they are more broadly safety-oriented. Also, the EU has always engaged in active transportation than has North America. Changing our culture and politics are necessary conditions for implementing the pyramid.
Second, not all tranches of the pyramid work along parallel timelines and equal time horizons and there can be feedback loops. While drivers' responsibility lies at the bottom of the pyramid, anyone can choose to drive safely today, while a political decision for a road diet would be implemented much later. In the long run, the road diet will yield the greatest safety, though. In the short term, individuals making better choices does more.
Not everyone has to be on board with a road diet to get it done. We just put part of Guadalupe Street in Santa Fe on a road diet. The MPO and City Council were behind it. Yes, there has been a lot of griping, too.
Culture and Politics are important factors, and they work on their own time lines. DWI is far less socially tolerated than it was fifty years ago. But distracted driving is the rage. Sigh.
Nobody would suggest that any project or policy requires 100% buy in. But regulation of driving is arguably the third rail of US politics. When 78% of workers drive, that suggests not only broad support for driving but also intense support for driving.
By contrast, where driving is less common for commuting and total trips, support for traffic safety is stronger and resistance is weaker. That's why Janette Sadikh-Khan could implement an aggressive program of road diets and vehicular restrictions in NYC and most of these treatments are still in place. On the other hand, in Houston, which is sprawling and more car dependent, most of the road diets in Houston under Mayor Turner have already been reversed; that is, literally ripped out of the rights-of-way. Transportation was a salient issue during the last mayoral campaign and that was bad for traffic safety. So I hope Austin has better results. The problem is that the culture and politics in the US are more like Houston than NYC.
Like the old AASHTO standards, the public wants throughput and LOS more than they want safety, and they are especially indifferent to pedestrian and cycling safety. We really need to sell more people on the idea of regulating their own driving. That's the way we get them to accept engineering for safety. There are only so many politicians who will grab and hold onto a third rail.
Stephanie, this is one of the best essays I have read on the subject of VZ and its dependence on the properly designed and built transportation environment. Indeed, if the "Three E's" had the Safe System Engineering approach as #1, it would make sense. But as you say, that is rarely the case in the U.S. and never in New Mexico. It always ends with the blame game.
Having worked in a high hazard facility at LANL where engineering controls are the first line of defense, and in transportation as a citizen-board member, one can see the difference. If we managed nuke facilities like we manage traffic, well.....say no more.
I’m late to this article, but I have to chime in to say: amen.
I worked entirely on road safety during my six years at USDOT, alongside incredibly dedicated people who are genuinely trying to advance a public-health, Safe System approach to preventing fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways.
And yet, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people give trainings on this topic who clearly don’t “get it.” Often, they don’t seem to realize how narrowly they’re focusing on individual behavior or that doing so is fundamentally at odds with what the Safe System Approach is actually about.
I am hopeful that things are starting to shift, and that more people are coming to recognize that these deaths and serious injuries are both preventable and unacceptable—and that the solution is not simply more education, enforcement, or paid media telling individuals to behave better, but systemic change by design.
Darren, thank you so much for weighing in - it is so validating to hear someone who worked for USDOT say this! I interviewed a few traffic professionals recently for background for this series and I swear there is a light behind the eyes of people who get it. And a sort of dullness where people do not. Yes, they want “safety” in the abstract, but they’re stuck in the mode that behind each crash is a personal moral failing. For a lot of people, there are no bad roads. Only bad drivers.
Love love love this article. So much. Thanks for this. Also if helpful, there’s evidence of fewer crashes and deaths after the bus lanes were installed on Central Ave. I was going to mention it in my TEDx but I figured it was maybe too soon because people were still angry about getting used to the new bus lanes! But the fatality decrease was clear.
Thank you! That is good info. I'm trying to remember if I have that somewhere but if you have a link handy please share?
57-100%% drop in severe crashes on ART street https://www.krqe.com/plus/data-reporting/unm-students-study-if-central-art-route-reduced-crashes
Also, a citation showing that Albuquerque’s downtown streets – Lomas, Martin Luther King, central, Lead, and coal – were designed for speeds of 50 mph! The long, straight, wide roads of grid designs makes racing and speeding much easier than in other cities https://books.google.com/books?id=DRlvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=albuquerque+grid+speeding&source=bl&ots=9UAygJoSZS&sig=ACfU3U14USfTCFmcftWeXRVzV9k4GW-0fQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi74veY_-f3AhX1rmoFHbYzDx8Q6AF6BAgrEAM#v=onepage&q=albuquerque%20grid%20speeding&f=false
As always… a great, thoroughly researched article, Stephanie. I learned a lot—and the point about leveraging felt speed makes sense.
In 2026, I plan to write and publish of history of the Dangerous by Design report, which is very narrow in scope, but aligns very well with Vision Zero advocacy in the US. It is critical that we stress vehicle design and road design as the best safety interventions since these have the best long-term outcomes for the public dollar and the public at-large does not understand this. Yet safety advocates are shooting ourselves in our foots when we overstress engineering. Culture and personal responsibility are still critical tranches of the safety problem.
I think engineering is really design-build. Traffic engineers sign off on some stuff that is counterintuitive to safety, all in the worship of level of service.
I sent Stephanie the powerpoint of a talk I gave way back in 2006, which compared the safety approach ALARA that we use in nuclear and high hazard facilities (where I worked at the time) to what we could do with traffic. It is obviously long in tooth but was a start.
The base of the safety pyramid, as Stephanie stresses, is the built environment we live in as it encourages either good or bad behavior and often, in the current paradigm, ignores risks. So designing streets to reduce crash severity and crash frequency (i.e., to minimize the destructive forces in a crash as well as reduce their frequency) by slowing things down and reducing the opportunities for high-energy crashes (e.g., replacing signalized intersections with roundabouts) is critical, but it doesn't mean we don't do anything else. It's just that we build on the pyramid. That includes building a safety culture, which is critical to ALARA, around safe systems rather than what we have today. I'd certainly include better quality driving, but not as the base of my pyramid.
The pyramid is well-ordered, but misses the first-order problems that act on the pyramid: culture and politics. These are both questions of values. These are all exogenous to the model. When drivers value maximizing speed and mobility at the expense of the extremely unlikely chance that they might kill or maim someone, these are likely nodes of cultural and political resistance to traffic safety. Someone who regulates their own driving appropriately would not object to broader safety regulation regimes. This is confirmed by the superior traffic safety results in Nordic countries, where they are more broadly safety-oriented. Also, the EU has always engaged in active transportation than has North America. Changing our culture and politics are necessary conditions for implementing the pyramid.
Second, not all tranches of the pyramid work along parallel timelines and equal time horizons and there can be feedback loops. While drivers' responsibility lies at the bottom of the pyramid, anyone can choose to drive safely today, while a political decision for a road diet would be implemented much later. In the long run, the road diet will yield the greatest safety, though. In the short term, individuals making better choices does more.
Not everyone has to be on board with a road diet to get it done. We just put part of Guadalupe Street in Santa Fe on a road diet. The MPO and City Council were behind it. Yes, there has been a lot of griping, too.
Culture and Politics are important factors, and they work on their own time lines. DWI is far less socially tolerated than it was fifty years ago. But distracted driving is the rage. Sigh.
Nobody would suggest that any project or policy requires 100% buy in. But regulation of driving is arguably the third rail of US politics. When 78% of workers drive, that suggests not only broad support for driving but also intense support for driving.
By contrast, where driving is less common for commuting and total trips, support for traffic safety is stronger and resistance is weaker. That's why Janette Sadikh-Khan could implement an aggressive program of road diets and vehicular restrictions in NYC and most of these treatments are still in place. On the other hand, in Houston, which is sprawling and more car dependent, most of the road diets in Houston under Mayor Turner have already been reversed; that is, literally ripped out of the rights-of-way. Transportation was a salient issue during the last mayoral campaign and that was bad for traffic safety. So I hope Austin has better results. The problem is that the culture and politics in the US are more like Houston than NYC.
Like the old AASHTO standards, the public wants throughput and LOS more than they want safety, and they are especially indifferent to pedestrian and cycling safety. We really need to sell more people on the idea of regulating their own driving. That's the way we get them to accept engineering for safety. There are only so many politicians who will grab and hold onto a third rail.
I was going to respond but Khal beat me to it - I can't say it any better!
Stephanie, this is one of the best essays I have read on the subject of VZ and its dependence on the properly designed and built transportation environment. Indeed, if the "Three E's" had the Safe System Engineering approach as #1, it would make sense. But as you say, that is rarely the case in the U.S. and never in New Mexico. It always ends with the blame game.
Having worked in a high hazard facility at LANL where engineering controls are the first line of defense, and in transportation as a citizen-board member, one can see the difference. If we managed nuke facilities like we manage traffic, well.....say no more.