The Road Not Taken | a response to a letter to the editor in the Washington Post about DC, traffic deaths and traffic safety
There's a letter to the editor in yesterday's Washington Post, "D.C. must step up on road deaths." It's a good letter.
I started writing a response in the comments, but it was too long. So a blog entry is better.
Definitely this is another example of DC government's failure to focus and to be innovative. It's amazing how much I've written about this topic, providing guidance for something that could have been great.
Ward focused traffic safety programming. Years ago I wrote a piece ("Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," 2015) about what would be an ideal approach to a truly ward-focused Councilmember election and governance platform, including having a dashboard on ward-specific data on traffic safety.
And that there should be ward-specific subcommittees of the pedestrian and bicycle advisory committees to put greater focus on ward specific improvements (this was something I wrote into the Pedestrian and Bicycle Plan I did for Baltimore County in 2010).
Safe routes to school programs. Separately, the State of Washington Safe Routes to School program recommends that all cities create traffic safety committees to address such issues as they relate to schools, and SRTS improvements simultaneously benefit neighborhoods. The state requires that SRTS maps be created for all elementary schools, and some cities go beyond and do it for all schools. Seattle's Feet First advocacy group is a great resource for such programs. The City of Tacoma separately has an SRTS plan that is first rate.
-- "Why isn't walking/biking to school programming an option in Suburban Omaha? | Inadequacies in school transportation planning," 2022
-- School Walk and Bike Routes: A Guide for Planning and Improving Walk and Bike to School Options for Students
-- Safe Routes to School program, Washington State
-- City of Tacoma SRTS program, including SRTS Action Plan
-- Starkville in Motion
A failed job interview with DDOT. I interviewed for a job with DDOT (still don't understand why I didn't get it) to liase with ANCs on these kinds of issues. I prepared a sample data-focused infographic that could be a kind of dashboard for ward-specific transportation as part of my interview.
For years I wrote that the DDOT safety dashboard was crap ("DC DDOT transportation access portal doesn't really say anything," 2010). It has since been significantly improved.
ANCs need transportation/traffic safety committees. In preparing for that interview, I looked at the websites for all of the city's Advisory Neighborhood Commssions (ANCs are block and neighborhood specific councils that weigh in on matters before DC government) and just a handful had transportation/public space committees. All should, with support from DDOT, the Office of Planning, and the police department traffic and data analysis units.
And public health. In Ontario for example, public health officials have been leaders in analyzing traffic deaths and addressing the issues (Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario: Pedestrian Death Review), and in Toronto ("Dozens of cycling deaths probed," Toronto Star).
It was a great interview, the lead walked me out and we talked, and then.... nothing.
FWIW, I also didn't get a job at Utah Department of Transportation on Vision Zero related issues, although I was a finalist. They said I wasn't innovative enough! Maybe they were right. Maybe I just come across badly. But I don't think so. However, I did mess up the interview a bit, and I had a mistake in my cover letter...
Then again, traffic safety related deaths in Utah, including bicyclists and pedestrians, are falling but only slightly, and in cities especially pedestrian deaths aren't abating ("Deaths on Utah roads down from 2022 but road rage still a concern," ABC4).
Transportation management districts. Since 2005 or 2006 I have been recommending that the city create Traffic Management Districts as a way to coordinate transportation management and improvements at the commercial district scale (e.g. for Downtown, H Street NE, Capitol Hill, etc.).
The city did create "pilot parking districts" but they weren't super well structured and are limited. The plans created for them impressed me in terms of how ad hoc and unstructured they were. And they never functioned the way I suggested (e.g., see the discussion on transportation wrt Eastern Market, "Eastern Market DC's 150th anniversary last weekend | And my never realized master plan for the market," 2023).
Urban design/walkable community plans at the neighborhood scale. Out of the Silver Spring Purple Line writings:
Creating a Silver Spring "Sustainable Mobility District from 2017:
-- "Part 1: Setting the stage
-- "Part 2: Program items 1- 9
-- "Part 3: Program items 10-18
I got interested in the concept of urban design plans for neighborhoods, sparked by Dupont Circle and the opening of the Wharf in SW DC.
-- "Planning urban design improvements at the neighborhood scale: Dupont Circle, DC," 2019
-- "More about making 17th Street between P and R a pedestrian space on weekends," 2019
Later I realized it's not about the mode--creating a pedestrian plan, but creating broader walkable community plans.
... and freeway/tunnel decking. Like the neighborhood initiative in Bloomingdale ("Bloomingdale Village Square Initiative will be holding its third Community Forum on the proposed North Capitol Deck-over Park," 2020), similar discussions in Dupont Circle, the SE-SW Freeway, etc.
It's a travesty that the planning units in DC think this should be done by the neighborhoods, not the city.
Pedestrian safety audits. Similar to Safe Routes to School. FHWA publishes materials on Pedestrian Road Safety Audits. There is the PEDSAFE: Pedestrian Safety Guide and Countermeasure Selection System to see if there are urban design improvements that can be made after analyzing a crash (also for biking).
-- All About Walk Audits, America Walks
WalkDenver has done interesting work in this arena too, such as the Walk Audits on Colfax Avenue, including a report on West Colfax.
Vision Zero. Focused on DC, I've written tons over the years about Vision Zero initiatives to reduce traffic deaths and traffic safety.
-- "A more radical approach to Vision Zero," 2019
-- "A reminder about how the entitlement of automobility is embedded into law and democratizes death by accident," 2014
-- "A "Vision Zero" agenda for DC," 2014
-- "DC and Vision Zero Revisited," 2015
-- "Updating Vision Zero approaches," 2016
-- First global benchmark for road safety in cities published by International Transport Forum," 2018
-- "Traffic safety," 2022
-- "It's a mistake to remove "Enforcement" from the "E's framework" of bicycle and pedestrian planning," 2022
-- "D.C. cuts speed limit to 20 mph to curb pedestrian deaths: a step forward but not enough | New thoughts on a comprehensive Vision Zero agenda," 2020
In "Revisiting Vision Zero in DC and NYC" (2021) I made these points:
1. How to measure and benchmark traffic deaths?
2. The issues are unchanging.
3. Government has a bias for inaction.
4. Planning for mode versus planning for place and livability.
5. Not treating the road system as a network.
6. Traffic deaths can be broadly categorized into three segments.
7. How do you get reckless drivers off the street?
8. Traffic enforcement.
9. Oversight Committees at the City/County and District/Ward scales.
10. Systematic review of crashes/accidents in a public fashion.
11. Mapping pedestrian, bicycle, transit and car accidents
Lots of links within each section.
Street design and pavements. The fact is, except for overly wide avenues, the L'Enfant Plan design for the city and its network of streets and sidewalks prioritizes sustainable modes--walking, biking, and transit.
That's why I've argued for years to have differentiated pavements for commercial districts, and areas by parks, libraries, schools, and transit stations, to better match desired operating speeds of vehicles with land use context.
-- "A more radical approach to "Vision Zero" is needed: reconstructing streets out of different materials to reduce speeds," 2019
-- "Pedestrian fatalities and street design," 2019
Note that one element of the L'Enfant Plan, radial avenues, was a big innovation for pedestrians and bicyclists as it makes it faster to get from place to place by moving diagonally, instead of in squares and rectangles.
Reckless driving. In DC, most traffic related injuries and deaths in DC are related to reckless driving, not street design. This is something that advocates don't really get, as after each high profile crash and death(s), they say it's because of street design. Sometimes there are issues, admittedly, but mostly it's recklessness.
I've mentioned this for years ("Social marketing and aberrant driving," 2020, "When the car lobby encourages law breaking," 2012), but only recently after some high profile deaths is the city addressing this ("Reckless drivers in spotlight as D.C. hits 16-year high on traffic deaths," Washington Post).
Labels: bicycle and pedestrian planning, car culture and automobility, civic engagement, public safety, sustainable mobility platform, traffic engineering, traffic safety and enforcement, urban design/placemaking
posted by Richard Layman @ 10:57 AM&Permanent Link
5 Comments:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/02/06/dc-speed-cameras-penalties/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/traffic-enforcement-road-design/681263
Reckless Driving Isn’t Just a Design Problem
Road-safety activists convinced themselves that law enforcement was unnecessary.
Ever wonder what would happen if the police just stopped enforcing traffic laws? New Jersey State Police ran a sort of experiment along those lines, beginning in summer 2023—about a week after the release of a report documenting racial disparities in traffic enforcement. From
July of that year to March 2024, the number of tickets issued by troopers for speeding, drunk
driving, and other serious violations fell by 61 percent. The drop, The New York Times
reported last month, “coincided with an almost immediate uptick in crashes on the state’s two
main highways.” During 2024 as a whole, roadway fatalities in New Jersey jumped 14 percent even as they dropped slightly nationwide. The obvious conclusion: The withdrawal of enforcement in the Garden State led some motorists to drive more recklessly. For better or worse, law enforcement is necessary for traffic safety.
In the past decade, though, an ideological faction within the road-safety movement has
downplayed the role of law enforcement in preventing vehicular crashes. This coalition of
urbanist wonks, transportation planners, academics, and nonprofit activist professionals has
instead fixated on passive measures to improve drivers’ vigilance and conscientiousness:
narrower lanes that encourage drivers to slow down, curb “bumpouts” that widen sidewalks
and shorten crosswalks, and other physical changes meant to calm vehicular traffic.
In many communities, the effort to promote safer driving through the physical redesign of streets comes under the banner of Vision Zero, a movement whose goal is to eliminate all traffic fatalities. But the design-first approach has become a substitute for individual responsibility rather than a complement.
Historically, design was only one ingredient in Vision Zero; in practice today, it is just about
the only one. Enforcement is expressly denigrated by even mainstream organizations. In
2022, when launching an initiative called “Dismantling Law Enforcement’s Role in Traffic
Safety: A Roadmap for Massachusetts,” the nonprofit LivableStreets Alliance claimed that “traffic stops do not meaningfully reduce serious and fatal crashes.” (Some grieving families in New Jersey might disagree.) The umbrella group Vision Zero Network, another nonprofit, asserted in November that “despite some achievements” associated with law enforcement,
“there is ample historical and current evidence showing the harms and inequities of some
types of enforcement, particularly traffic stops.” (This is clear and troubling; the question is what conclusion to draw.) Some activists even criticize automated speed cameras—which require no intervention by potentially biased officers—because of the financial burden on low income drivers.
For good reason, progressives have been alarmed by racial inequities in law enforcement,
and New Jersey’s experience to some degree validates those concerns: Troopers eased up
on writing tickets because they apparently were unhappy about outside scrutiny of
discriminatory practices. But the episode is also a forceful demonstration of the value of
enforcement as a public service. If you take coercive measures off the table, you must agree to share the road with people driving under the influence or at double the speed limit.
... Yet the growth in vehicle deaths is difficult to explain simply in structural terms. For starters,
nearly all of the surge in U.S. pedestrian fatalities since 2010 comes from collisions at night.
Changes to street design simply do not address the leading causes of crash deaths: failure to wear a seatbelt, drunk driving, and speeding.
Today’s Vision Zero incorporates some useful insights about design’s power to influence
behavior. The goal of reconfiguring streets is to “nudge” people toward better driving, much as calorie counts on menus are supposed to promote healthier eating. These ideas, seemingly everywhere in the early 2000s, draw on a pop version of Nobel Prize–winning
behavior-economics research. With the benefit of additional evidence, we now know that their effectiveness is easier to show in a TED Talk than in real life.
In the case of traffic safety, the overemphasis on nudging has warped our thinking. For
example, street-design essentialism presumes that the most dangerous driving behaviors
are unconscious, when we know that many drivers actively choose to be reckless. No country that has improved its safety record—including Sweden, where Vision Zero was born in the 1990s—has made it infeasible to drive a car dangerously if you want to. What our peer countries have done is pair targeted design improvements with targeted and even intensified
enforcement campaigns.
Beyond street design, what should communities focus on to improve safety? Half of vehicle occupants killed by crashes were not wearing their seatbelt. Drunk driving is a factor in nearly one-third of crash fatalities. The same is true of speeding. Not all speeding is the
same, though; going 55 miles an hour in a 50 zone generally isn’t the problem. Super speeders—motorists driving, say, double the limit—are likely overrepresented in traffic deaths. Street design, which seeks to make the average driver more conscientious, does
nothing to target the anti-social behavior of outliers.
Rather than justifying a permissive approach to reckless driving, social justice demands a more focused campaign.
The D.C. region is twice as deadly for pedestrians as a decade ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/02/23/pedestrian-deaths-dc-region
DC DOT director says 75-80% of traffic fatalities in DC are related to reckless driving.
https://wtop.com/dc/2025/02/dc-officials-announce-new-plan-to-lower-traffic-deaths-and-crashes
DC officials announce new plan to lower traffic deaths and crashes
Two specific areas are being targeted for increased traffic enforcement for the next 60 days, including a higher police presence: New York Avenue NE beginning at 4th Street and extending to Bladensburg Road, and South Capitol Street from Southern Avenue to MLK Boulevard, east of the Anacostia River.
After this initial 60-day program, D.C. officials will review the data and then target other parts of the city.
“The Safety Corridor Initiative is a targeted approach to reduce crashes and save lives on our roadways,” said Rick Birt, D.C.’s director of highway safety. “These corridors have resulted in 427 injuries and two fatalities since 2022.”
D.C. Department of Transportation Director Sharon Kershbaum said her department’s research shows that just 5% of roads are responsible for 50% of crashes — and these two corridors are at the top of the list.
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