Thirty-six people died in traffic crashes in Washington, D.C. last year, a 20% increase from 2017. Eight people, six of whom were walking or biking, have already been killed this year, prompting a major public rally just two weeks ago. Residents are angry that the city isn’t succeeding in curbing road deaths, despite the fact that Mayor Muriel Bowser committed to end traffic fatalities entirely by 2024.
It’s a common plight. While more than 40 cities in the United States and many more around the world have committed to Vision Zero, a global movement to end traffic-related fatalities and serious injuries by taking a systemic approach to road safety, many are struggling to turn this vision into a reality. Citizens themselves can pursue road safety at many levels— in their schools, workplaces, streets and communities. But it’s the elected leaders who control budgets and priorities for their jurisdiction who really have the responsibility to catalyze lasting improvements that will save people’s lives. As UN Global Road Safety Week kicks into gear this week, it’s time to ask the question: What does political leadership in road safety really look like?
Three factors are important:
1. Achievable Targets to Reduce Road Deaths
Research on 14 countries that set quantified road safety targets between 1981 and 1999 led to significant improvements in road safety. A target of zero deaths sets the stage for action, but city leaders need to also set ambitious and realistic intermediary targets. This allows policymakers to monitor and evaluate progress, and then adapt programs as needed.
Policymakers should also set context-specific targets and consider adopting additional indicators of success beyond reducing deaths and injuries, such as shifts in public perceptions or achieving systemic changes like setting appropriate speed limits. This allows policymakers to measure progress while waiting for the number of collisions, deaths and injuries to decline.
London is widely recognized as a leader in taking a holistic, systemic approach to road safety. After reducing road deaths by 45% over the past decade by improving street designs and reducing speed limits, Mayor Sadiq Khan formally adopted the Vision Zero concept in 2018. The commitment came with an Action Plan for eliminating deaths and serious injuries by 2041, including intermediary goals to reduce deaths and serious injuries 65% below 2005-09 levels by 2022, and 70% below 2010-14 levels by 2030. The plan also set many other measurable targets to meet along the way, such as specific reductions in fatalities involving public buses establishing speed limits of 20 mph on certain streets.
London has reduced road deaths 45% over the past decade by improving street designs and reducing speed limits. Photo by Max Pixel
2) Integrated Funding for Road Safety
As more people realize that traffic deaths are one of the leading causes of deaths globally, many multinational and philanthropic road safety funds and networks have emerged to help address the problem. However, local leaders need to back up their commitments to reducing deaths by directly allocating funding for road safety improvements. In addition to the ethical imperative to save lives, this investment is economical: Dangerous roads generate costs in terms of lost lives and productivity, as well as negative impacts on development.
A study by the International Road Assessment Program showed that it would only take 1–3% of road construction budgets to increase road safety, suggesting that the problem is more about awareness and perceptions rather than a lack of resources. Studies also show the benefits of shifting from costly urban highways to well-designed streets with public transport and pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure.
Because road safety is a multifaceted issue, budgets should not be allocated into road safety projects in isolation. Rather, any budget allocation for mobility – from street design to licensing to public transport planning – should be conditional on having a safety component. The Washington Area Bicycle Association (WABA) cited the lack of safe-street principles in major mobility projects as one of Washington, D.C.’s underlying barriers to achieving its Vision Zero commitment. The city currently lacks policies requiring that the millions of dollars to be invested in road infrastructure are spent on projects that achieve safe street designs.
Bogota, Colombia. Photo by EEIM/Wikimedia Commons
3) A Willingness to Make Tough Decisions to Prioritize Safety
Cities that have emerged as true road safety leaders have made tough but crucial decisions to prioritize safety, like installing speed cameras, lowering speed limits and redistributing street space. These decisions often face initial resistance, but as lives are saved and unexpected co-benefits like reduced congestion emerge, popularity tends to grow.
For example, Bogota, Colombia recently developed a Speed Management Plan to help set and enforce safe speed limits. One of the actions involved reducing the speed limit from 60 to 50 kilometers per hour in five of the city’s most dangerous arterial roads, where about 150 traffic deaths are reported every year. The plan has already reduced traffic fatalities by 32%, saving 22 lives since late 2018. While the public and media initially criticized the move and worried it would increase traffic congestion, preliminary indications suggest that reduced speed limits may have actually improved traffic congestion by evening out traffic flows and reducing bottlenecks.
Many cities, such as Fortaleza, Brazil, are also experimenting with reallocating street space to better balance the space afforded to cars with areas for non-motorized and public transport. In order to mitigate public concerns, Fortaleza started with road safety projects that would have more community support, such as low speed zones around hospitals and schools and improving public spaces.
The city only tackled traditionally unpopular measures, such as speed limit reductions, after the first projects yielded positive results and citizens had the opportunity to experience the benefits firsthand. For example, after 235 people died on two arterials between 2007 and 2017, the city reduced speed limits from 60 kilometers per hour to 50 kilometers per hour and installed new traffic lights, pedestrian signals, cycle tracks, a bus lane and more. The transformation reduced crash-related injuries 41% on one arterial alone.
There’s no denying that city leaders face many complex pressures and competing demands from their citizens. Few parts of cities are more contested than the streets we live and travel on. Leaders can’t backtrack on safety interventions like speed limits in order to gain politically, nor should they sign up for commitments like Vision Zero if they don’t back up their words with action. The ultimate responsibility of leaders is to protect their citizens. Peoples’ lives should not be a political bargaining chip.
Fewer than 3 people per 100,000 are killed in road crashes in Sweden every year, less than almost anywhere else in the world. In contrast, it’s 11 per 100,000 in countries like India and the United States.
One reason for the difference? A “Safe System” approach.
Preventing Road Deaths with a Safe System
In 1999, the Swedish Parliament established a road safety program known as “Vision Zero.” Moving beyond the usual driver-focused methods of improving road safety—such as seat-buckling and sober-driving campaigns—the country adopted a Safe System approach. The premise of this approach is that while human error is inevitable, traffic fatalities and serious injuries should not be. Rather than expect humans to behave perfectly, the Safe System makes all parts of the mobility system safe to reduce the opportunity for a fatal or severe crash to occur. The focus is on reducing people’s exposure to fatal crash forces by keeping speeds to survivable levels and separating transport modes where necessary. The strategy worked—Sweden’s road fatality rate fell 55 percent between 1994 and 2015.
Other countries such as the Netherlands and Norway have taken similar approaches. As documented in a new WRI report, countries employing a Safe System have achieved both the lowest rates of traffic deaths and the largest reductions in fatalities over the past 20 years. More than one million deaths could be avoided every year if the rest of the world achieved levels of road safety comparable to these best-performing countries.
The approach holds particular promise for low- and middle-income countries, where 90 percent of the world’s traffic-related deaths occur.
What Does a Safe System Look Like?
Citizens are often blamed for traffic collisions – for not paying attention or driving too fast– but this mindset fails to assess whether roads are safe to begin with for pedestrians, drivers and cyclists. Humans will always make mistakes, and they should not have to pay for these with their lives. The Safe System approach views road safety as a public health issue, rather than one of personal responsibility alone. It thus shifts responsibility away from people using the roads to the engineers, planners and officials designing them. It involves holistic strategies such as:
1) Designing streets for safety
The way that streets are designed has a powerful impact on how people behave. This may sound obvious, but the reality is that many roads around the world are designed primarily to maximize speeds or improve traffic flow, creating dangerous spaces for road users. Bogota, Colombia recently implemented a Vision Zero Safe System, with the first phase targeting street design around schools and hospitals. “Traffic-calming” measures such as speed humps, reduced lane widths, improved road markings, and protected medians for pedestrians reduced vehicle speeds and increased visibility for people walking. Preliminary results show that this strategy and other Safe System actions have helped Bogota’s road fatalities drop 8 percent in just one year.
2) Improving options for mobility
Research shows that the more private vehicle miles traveled, the greater the exposure to risk for drivers, passengers and other road users. So if more people walk, bike and take public transport, road safety overall improves. As an added bonus, this can also increase physical activity and reduce emissions.
In Bogota, officials reformed the city’s chaotic public bus system by implementing a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system with dedicated lanes, covered bus stops and high-quality buses, while also improving walkways and bike lanes for pedestrians and cyclists. As a result, the city saw a significant drop in traffic fatalities. When these infrastructure improvements slowed, so did reductions in traffic fatalities. Ambitious plans to further expand the city’s BRT system and install a metro are expected to make the mobility system even safer.
3) Managing speed to reduce fatalities
At lower speeds, drivers can see more of their surroundings, have more time to react to unexpected events and can stop in a shorter distance. Furthermore, survivable speeds in collisions are generally much lower than people expect. For example, if hit by a vehicle moving at 30 kilometers per hour (kph), a pedestrian has a 90 percent chance of survival, but if hit at 50 kph, they have only a 15 percent chance of survival. Mexico City, which recently implemented a Safe System-based strategy, reduced its speed limits and updated its fine system for traffic infractions. This and other strategies have helped reduce the city’s road fatality rate by 14 percent over the past two years.
4) Coordinating institutions
A Safe System begins with the premise that mobility planners, operators and decision makers must guarantee the safety of citizens and provide road users with the best opportunity to behave safely. That takes strong coordination with a lot of different actors. Sweden’s Vision Zero plan involves traffic engineers, law enforcement, vehicle designers, medical specialists, educators, journalists, social scientists and government officials.
The Human Cost of Inaction
A Safe System can be applied anywhere, but it’s especially urgent in the developing world. Ninety percent of the 1.25 million annual traffic fatalities occur in low- and middle-income countries. It’s a human health crisis and an economic one: Traffic collisions cost these nations an estimated 5 percent of their economic productivity. That’s like living in a permanent recession—the United States lost 5 percent of its GDP during the 2008 Great Recession. Safe roads are not a luxury, but a necessity, and the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action.
The stunning thing is that we know how to prevent road deaths. The guidance in Sustainable and Safe: A Vision and Guidance for Zero Road Deaths lays out how. Now it’s up to decision makers, technical experts and communities to start saving lives.
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“Slow Down, Save Lives.” WRI works to make cities around the world safer and more sustainable by implementing street design and regulations that reduce vehicle speeds while supporting walking and cycling. There is a growing body of evidence on the impacts and wider benefits of such efforts, which we’ll explore in blog posts this week.
Traffic crashes kill 1.25 million people every year and cause permanent disability to millions more. No matter the location, speed is frequently a factor.
Deaths and serious injuries are the painful and highly visible result of a lack of road safety, but we have lost more to high car speeds than we realize. What about fear of children playing on sidewalks, walking to school, or learning to ride a bike? What about people who struggle to pay high transport costs, but don’t feel safe commuting by bike?
Speeding cars can limit physical activity, use of public space and quality of life, and the impacts are felt most by the least advantaged . Lower-income residents often live in close proximity to roads with dangerously fast-moving traffic. They are also more dependent on walking, biking or public transport, which are most exposed to the danger of speeding cars. These negative impacts are even more dramatic in developing countries, where a rapid increase in car and motorcycle ownership is taking place on roads with little speed regulation.
Unfortunately, this can literally be a matter of life and death. But establishing safer speeds in cities can not only save lives, it can also generate many other benefits in the process:
1. Lower speeds save lives.
Every 1.6 kilometer-per-hour (1 mph) reduction in vehicle speeds on urban streets results in a 6 percent decrease in traffic fatalities. Lower speed limits reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries for a combination of reasons. For one, driving at very high speeds can result in tunnel vision and decreased depth perception for the driver. At lower speeds, drivers have a wider field of vision and are more likely to notice other road-users.
At lower speeds, even if a crash does occur, the consequences will be less severe, especially if it involves a pedestrian, cyclist or motorcyclist. A pedestrian has a 90 percent chance of survival if hit by a vehicle moving at 30 kmph (18.64 mph). This decreases to 70 percent at 40 kmph (24.85 mph) and less than 20 percent at 50kmph (31 mph).
Driving at lower speeds also enables drivers to stop within a shorter distance. The stopping distance of a vehicle is a combination of the distance travelled during the driver’s reaction time and the distance it takes for the car to stop after the brakes are applied. At higher speeds, a car travels further during this reaction time and the stopping distance is greater. This affects the rate of momentum at the point of a crash, and therefore the possibility of survival. 
2. Safer speed limits don’t necessarily make trips longer.
Many people fear that slowing the speed limit in urban areas will dramatically increase journey time. However, average road speeds in cities are more determined by the frequency of intersections than speed limits.
A safer speed limit can achieve more uniform speeds and reduce dangerous midblock acceleration, while adding little to overall journey times. Research from Grenoble, France has shown that a speed limit of 30 kmph (18.64 mph) rather than 50 kmph (31 mph) only added 18 seconds of travel time between intersections 1 km (.62 miles) apart. Lower speed limits may even reduce congestion in some cases, as they reduce the likelihood of bottlenecks. This has been observed in Sao Paulo, where lowering the speed limit on major arterials reduced congestion by 10 percent during the first month of implementation, while fatalities also dropped significantly.
3. Designing for safer speeds fosters healthier communities.
Lower car speeds create a more comfortable environment for pedestrians and cyclists. Street design that encourages safer speeds—such as narrower lanes and wider sidewalks, raised crosswalks and curb extensions—also provide more space for pedestrians and make it easier to cross the road. Details on these and other measures can be found in WRI’s Cities Safer by Design report.
With speed-slowing infrastructure, cities may see positive trends in residents opting to walk or bike instead of driving. London is currently employing these measures to encourage more walking trips, and anticipates it will reap health and economic benefits. One study found that the United States could save $5.6 billion in health care costs if one in 10 adults started walking regularly. Residents opting to take fewer trips by car also means fewer harmful emissions and a reduced overall risk of traffic collisions.
4. Slower speeds are good for the economy.
Studies have found that streets that are more inviting for walkers and cyclists are more vibrant and economically successful than streets with high volumes of fast-moving traffic. Benefits include increased real estate value and higher spending on retail and services, boosting the local economy. For example, when street designs with narrower lanes slowed traffic in the Mission District of San Francisco, nearly 60 percent of retailers reported increased spending by local people, and nearly 40 percent reported an overall increase in sales. Meanwhile, London’s Kensington Street saw a 13 percent increase in the price of apartments when safety and design improvements were made to the streetscape, and estimates that better shopping access for pedestrians will generate millions of pounds in increased retail spending. The research is now abundantly clear: Getting drivers to slow down can improve the quality of life for all city dwellers.
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Roughly 3,400 people around the world die every day from traffic crashes. In most of the Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), more people die in traffic crashes annually than from violent crimes. While the location and circumstance of the traffic fatalities differ, between one-third and one-half of them have something in common: speed. Humans can only stand so much force from crash impact, and much of this is determined by vehicle speed. In the city of Mumbai, 91 percent of total crash fatalities are attributed to excessive speeding. In the United States, more than 9,200 crash fatalities a year are due to speeding.
There are a few key actions communities can take that can reduce—or even help eliminate—traffic deaths and serious injuries. Here are four basic steps:
1. Set a safe speed limit.
Achieving safe speeds starts with safe speed limits. The surprising reality is that only 47 countries currently have suitable laws on urban speeds, representing 13 percent of the global population.
The speed limit should be set and enforced based on the type of road, the quality of the road infrastructure and the safety level of the local vehicle fleet. This can happen at the national, state or local level, or at all three.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends speed limits of 30 kmph (19 mph) on urban streets with high volumes of pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists, and up to 50 kmph (31 mph) on urban arterials with fewer pedestrians. Seemingly small differences in speed really matter. There is a 10 percent potential for death if a pedestrian is hit by a speeding vehicle at 30 kmph (18.64 mph), which doubles to 20 percent at 35 kmph (22mph). At 50 kmph (31 mph), the likelihood of death is more than 80 percent. In the first month of reduced speed limits on two major arterials in São Paulo in 2015, fatal crashes fell by 29 percent from the year before.
2. Promote and enforce the speed limit.
In many places, even if speed limits do exist, they may not be enforced by authorities or known and followed by drivers. Technology like speed cameras can help. For instance, Washington, D.C. saw a 60 to 80 percent reduction in speed violations within four to six months of camera deployment. During the same period, the city experienced a 70 percent reduction in traffic fatalities.
Whatever the means of enforcement, cities should adopt a low tolerance for speeding. In many cities, speeding drivers are not given tickets until they are 10 kmph (6 mph) or even 16 kmph (10 mph) over the speed limit. But an increase of only 10 kmph can be the difference between life and death.
3. Design streets for their speed limits.
A driver’s choice of travel speed is influenced by the characteristics of the road, so street design is critically important. Narrow lanes are proven to reduce speeds, along with resulting in more attentive driving. Partial lane-narrowing designs, known as chicanes and chokers, help to slow down vehicles midblock. They also reduce the distance a pedestrian has to travel to cross a road. Chicanes can reduce crashes with injuries by 54 percent, while chokers help to reduce speeds by up to 14 percent. Speed humps and speed cushions can reduce crashes with injuries by 50 percent. Raised crossings also require cars to slow down, and help to improve the driver’s awareness of pedestrians. Evidence from Latin American cities shows that raised crossings result in a 10 percent reduction in midblock speeds. Details on these and other evidence-based measures can be found in WRI’s Cities Safer by Design report.
4. Get communities on board.
Most people aren’t aware of how speed affects their safety and well-being, or that these issues can be addressed. Print, broadcast and online media campaigns help build awareness. However, the most effective means of getting attention and changing public perception takes direct engagement, imagination, and local flavor.
In New York, the “That’s why it’s 30” campaign featured advertisements making fun of New Yorkers’ tendency to “know everything,” while speed-activated signs displayed a digital skeleton to speeding drivers. Like a growing number of cities, New York has also had great success with tactical urbanism – making temporary changes to an intersection, street or neighborhood to allow citizens to experience the benefits of better street design and slower speeds for themselves. In many cases, such temporary interventions wind up becoming so popular that they are made permanent, such as the iconic Broadway redesign. These measures are so effective that the WHO is encouraging Slow Down Days for Global Road Safety Week this week.
The “That’s why it’s 30” campaign in New York was launched in 2010 to make residents aware of the speed limit and the risks of exceeding it. The 30 mph speed limit has since been reduced to 25 mph for even greater safety. Photo by NYC Department of Transportation
As communities experience the benefits of lower speeds, they will begin to demand them, as has been seen in London. Starting in the 2000s, the city introduced small 20 mph zones to improve safety in some neighborhoods. This intervention reduced fatalities by 23 percent within the zones, and by 3 percent in adjacent areas. The benefits were so well received that by 2016, 9 out of 13 inner-London boroughs had adapted 20 mph limits.
As awareness of the benefits of safer speeds gains momentum, the demand for decision makers to design safer and more enjoyable streets will continue to grow.
This week is the third United Nations Global Road Safety week, and the theme is saving children’s lives on roads worldwide.
TheCityFix had the chance to sit down with Jan Gehl, renowned architect and urban designer, and Ani Dasgupta, global director of WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. Their conversation explored why rapidly growing cities worldwide need to prioritize moving people over cars, and how a safer city for children is ultimately a safer city for all.
Ani Dasgupta (left), director of WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. Jan Gehl (right), founding partner of Gehl Architects.
A big focus of Road Safety week is saving the lives of children. Why are children important for creating safer cities?
Jan: I would like to open with a story. I was recently in Hanoi, Vietnam and I met a woman Ms. Lan who had just been to Copenhagen. She asked me if we had a baby boom in Copenhagen. I said ‘no it’s actually the opposite–we won’t have any Danish people left in 200 years’, but she couldn’t believe it. There were kindergarteners walking around on the sidewalks, bicycles with several children, young children bicycling on the bike lanes with their parents, and there were children walking to school. My granddaughter who is 7 can stay on a continuous sidewalk. This is an important change for the life of children. I always say if you come to a city and see many children, it’s a sure sign of city quality.
Ani: I grew up in India. Nearly all Indian cities, whether its Chennai, Delhi, or Mumbai, are scary places to be. You could be pushed over, run over. Our motivation is sustainable cities, but we think a city can’t be sustainable if people can’t raise their children safely and thrive as a family. Traffic accidents are a leading cause of death for children in cities worldwide.
In these rapidly developing cities, how do you convince mayors and decision-makers that people-friendly policies need to be a priority?
Jan: In Curitiba or Bogota, they had a policy that by making poor people more mobile, you would improve their life and economic conditions, rather than spending three hours on a slow bus.
This is the kind of policy that is needed. In Copenhagen, we have been talking about fostering walking and cycling for 50 years, so it’s become part of the general mindset from the mayor down to everyone. When you change the mindset, people will be in favor of certain policies.
Ani: I totally agree, but the problem is that we don’t have 50 years. We have a short window to avoid large lock-in effects. In Kolkata, India where I visited recently, I was told that they are banning bicycles and expanding roads. But car drivers are only a small percentage of the population, so this is highly inequitable. How do we accelerate this transformation?
Jan: People can never ask for something they don’t know about or haven’t seen. A best practice is very strong medicine, so we need to be sure people are informed about the alternatives that exist, and be inspired by what they have seen elsewhere, like in Curitiba, or Bogota, for example.
Also, once people are aware of the costs involved, they can see: Every time someone rides a bike 1 km, society gains 42 cents. Every time someone drives a car 1 km, society loses 20 cents. If you put all this together, it’s much cheaper to bicycle, and it’s very good for society to save on health costs for people in their old age.
Ani: It’s also a problem of capabilities. I’ve visited many of these rapidly developing cities and I’ve spoken with the mayors there. Many just don’t have the capacity to build new transit options fast enough to keep up with the demand.
Jan: I know that there are great problems in overcoming the political system and corruption. But even in China, we recently worked in Shanghai and found that they are in the process of realizing there is no future in the car-oriented policies they pursued in the past.
How can we apply the successes from cities in Europe, like Copenhagen, to rapidly growing cities that face different challenges?
Ani: In the cities where we work, like in Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Turkey, the parents of middle class families (like my parents) grew up without cars. The car is a social aspiration. We have to be aware of that reality as we work to convince cities of the benefits of reducing cars.
Jan: This is true, but we can use these cities as inspirations to show that it can be changed by clever policies. The South American mayors are good examples of this. In all my work, I take man as universal: we are built the same way—we have the same senses, so solutions can be universal. What is good quality in Copenhagen is also good quality in India.
