Street Design Essentialism: Part I

A growing share of street safety activists have talked themselves into a fantasy.

Most social problems are characterized by a mix of systemic and individual factors and lend themselves to interventions on both dimensions. Roadway safety is one such problem.

In a recent article in The Atlantic (gift link) published during the waning days of the Biden administration, I coined the term street design essentialism. It describes the view that dangerous street design, a systemic problem, so profoundly affects unconscious behavior as to overwhelm the role of the individual in road safety. Street design essentialism posits that the only solution—or the only solution worth advocating—is to redesign streets.

Whether or not they say so explicitly, a growing faction of the road safety movement—specifically, its activist, insurgent faction—now functionally embraces this approach.

I have written at length about the contribution of dangerous street design to the poor road safety outcomes we observe in the US. Yet the fixation on this as the source of that problem is misguided.

Street design is an irrelevant factor for a large share, and possibly a majority, of roadway fatalities. Consider seatbelt use: about one half of vehicle occupant deaths are now among people who were not wearing a restraint. Drunk driving is involved in about one third of road fatalities. Design is not responsive to these problems. In other cases, like extreme speeding, it may be a small help but not the best tool.

And this is the thing to remember about street design as a solution to roadway deaths: it is only one tool. Now, if your goal is to use safety as a wedge to open up a different conversation—about improving the vitality of cities or reducing car emissions, for example, or shrinking the enforcement capacity of the state—that might provide additional reasons to support a design-only intervention. But, to state the obvious, these are distinct projects that are not essential to improving roadway safety.

Promoting design over enforcement has the convenient additional benefit of generating contracts and grants (including until recently, from USDOT) for aligned consultancies and nonprofits, which is all the more reason to critically examine the assumption that design trumps individual factors.

I hasten to add that enforcement includes automated speed and red-light camera enforcement, the very type that most reduces the risk of bias and violent conflict. There are many studies showing the effectiveness of cameras, with details varying place to place.

Reckless Driving Isn’t Just a Design Problem

The title of my article in the Atlantic is Reckless Driving Isn't Just a Design Problem. While I did not select this title, I think it is apt. (I also summarized key points in a thread (Bluesky; X).)

This post expands on that article, and to some extent responds to feedback and questions I’ve received. In the interest of time and in the spirit of newsletters, this post will be light on citations, but much of what I say is based on past research of mine, available here. There will be a second part in due time.

US Roadway Fatalities Are a First-Tier Social Problem Distinguishable from Questions of Urban Livability

To set the table: America, with over 40,000 road deaths a year, is the roadway safety pariah of the rich world. Cross-country comparisons can be tricky¹ because of immense differences in important contributing factors, but Canada, for example, has a bit over one third the US’ roadway fatalities per capita. That’s despite the many similarities that characterize the built environment, lifestyle, and standard of living in the two countries.²

Chart from International Transport Forum Road Safety Report 2024

Fatalities per capita is a standard way to measure a public health risk, but not the only way. One downside of that measure is that it does not control for exposure levels. Americans drive a lot, and vehicle miles traveled explain some of the gap between the US and other countries. But less than it once did.

On a VMT basis, the nearest large wealthy country comparison in road fatality rate is France. We have roughly 50% more deaths per VMT than France.³

Chart from International Transport Forum Road Safety Report 2024

How to explain the US safety deficit? There’s no one answer. For starters, in any country there are many inputs into road safety: licensure (I have a new article on one dimension of this with co-authors), traffic laws and enforcement, road and vehicle design, culture, weather, quality of hospital access and emergency services, road surface quality, and so forth. But given the scale of the problem it absolutely merits more study and public investment.

All of which is to say it’s an important but complex problem.

The Indispensability of Enforcement

Most complex problems do not lend themselves well to simple solutions. In other work, I identify a multitude of both problems and solutions (this article details obstacles in about eight areas of substantive law, for example).

What the Atlantic article does is make the case for a role for one type of intervention—traffic enforcement—to enhance road safety. In particular, it makes the case for enforcement of laws targeting that subset of antisocial driving behaviors that are especially deadly.

The article emphasizes enforcement among the various useful policy levers for two reasons. First, some types of especially risky behavior are not deterrable via other means. Basic deterrence theory suggests, and studies confirm, that enforcement is helpful in curbing some undesirable behaviors, including in the domain of roadway safety. The peer countries whose records US road safety advocates frequently invoke (Sweden chief among them) rely on enforcement in concert with other tools, and it would be surprising if we could bring our record anywhere close to their level without it.

But the article also emphasizes enforcement for a second reason: it is a type of intervention that has recently been orphaned by a growing constituency within the very space—road safety advocacy—where you would expect it to find strong adherence and indeed where historically it once did.

The article’s enforcement focus is expressly not on minor violations but on serious ones. Driving 90mph in a 45, for example, or routinely running red lights.

It is important for people whose paycheck and career do not depend on conforming their views to the shifting demands of movement organizers to say out loud that enforcement—especially of grave violations and against repeat offenders—is essential to improving road safety. This includes automated safety enforcement but artificially limiting its scope to instances where automation is feasible would defeat the purpose by, for example, leaving unaddressed the deadly risks posed by those driving speeding stolen cars or cars with fake tags.

Among other things, shying away from talking about the benefits of enforcement at a time when deaths of people on foot and bike are surging means that the space of reasonable advocacy is ceded entirely to the establishment safety groups, which are traditionally focused on car occupant safety.

The Controversialness of Enforcement

If enforcing grave traffic violations sounds uncontroversial, you are probably coming at this from outside the world of professional nonprofit road safety advocacy, where the concept of enforcement has been subordinated or disavowed by leading nonprofit organizations in recent years. These organizations—insurgents in an issue space long dominated by AAA, MADD, and state and federal departments of transportation, all of which are traditionally car-oriented in focus—favor street redesigns ahead of and sometimes to the exclusion of enforcement.

Where design works, it’s great. No one thinks we should do away with guardrails, for example, and instead just ticket people who drive off the road. Expanding these insights to introduce subtler changes, like adding bump-outs to shorten crosswalks and enhance pedestrian safety in cities (things I have written about at length), is a key and enduring contribution of the road safety insurgents.

But even when an insight is clever and useful, it is good to have a sense of its limitations.

It makes no sense to make design functionally the exclusive means to the end of safety. And if you read their reports, and attend their webinars and conferences, you’ll see little enthusiasm for—and frequently dismissal of—anything else.

Case Study: The Push Against School-Zone Enforcement

Overclaiming the potential of design to curb antisocial behavior has become de rigueur among some movement professionals, some of whom wrote to me or tagged me on social media—or, in the case of Vision Zero Network, wrote an entire "rebuttal" to my article.⁴

Critics’ arguments largely fell into one of two categories.⁵ First: you are factually wrong that we oppose enforcement; we just think it’s not enough by itself, so we focus on design. Second: you are factually right that we oppose enforcement; we think it is ineffectual and irretrievably biased, so we focus on design.

While these criticisms appear to be in conflict, they both express a reluctance or unwillingness to call for more enforcement.

Some organizations oppose even automated enforcement pretty much altogether (including because it uses fines, but they also oppose the more coercive measures like armed officer interventions for which automated fines substitute). These organizations have a different, and far broader, agenda—reform of what they call the criminal legal system—than road safety groups.

But—whether for ideological reasons, the realpolitik of coalitional harmony in deep blue enclaves, or some other reason⁶—road safety groups have bent their message to align it with the broader goal of shrinking the enforcement capacity of the state.

Examples from Seattle, Portland, Connecticut, and California can be found in a recent report by a group called the Vision Zero Network (see p. 11). Reproduced from the report, here is a matrix Seattle uses to determine where to site speed safety cameras to protect schoolchildren. Read the short description and see if you can spot the key assumption. As you do so, bear in mind that, per the Vision Zero Network description, the “goal is to prevent overconcentrating cameras in disadvantaged communities that already experience increased burdens due to various societal factors.”

Vision Zero Network: Fair Warnings: Recommendations to Promote Equity in Speed Safety Camera Programs

The report authors are absolutely correct that policymakers should actively work to address concentrated disadvantage. The question is, which is the worse thing to do “to” a disadvantaged community: reduce protections of its schoolchildren or boost automated camera enforcement of those who drive through it recklessly? The bigger threat appears to be doing the latter: the benefit to local kids in the form of safety is not justified by the burden on those who speed past their schools in the form of a ticket by mail. Though it is couched in equity language, this argument should be recognized for the perverse outcome it is advocating: the withdrawal of an important public service—safety—specifically from disadvantaged areas.

Whataboutism in Road Safety

The increasingly standard response to this question of priorities in the activist wing of the road safety movement is to avoid it by asking, what about design? The real solution, it is said, is to spend (billions and billions) on safer infrastructure. Indeed, the report’s first recommendation is to “Prioritize upstream, preventive safety measures along with—or in place of—speed safety cameras wherever possible.” (emphasis added). Bracketing for the moment the question of how helpful design can really be against willful antisocial behavior in general, this prioritization framing of course begs the question of what to do when these design solutions are not feasible or effective in a given case.⁷

Taking the framing of this public report at face value, the fact that a neighborhood is disadvantaged is a reason to deprive its children of protection rather than to mail a ticket to those passing through who would strike them.

This is misguided. The cure—especially when it’s a camera and a $50 ticket,⁸ not an armed intervention by the state—is very obviously not worse than the disease of elevated risk of drivers racing into crowds of school children. Nor should children’s safety be made conditional on design reforms beating the odds to get implemented. This is true in rich neighborhoods. It’s true in poor neighborhoods. Whether it is more true in one place seems beside the point—unless the point is to abolish or cut fines, not improve safety. That is the objective of some movements, but it conflicts with the longstanding mission of the road safety movement. There is no safe road system in the world that doesn’t apply rules backed up by sanctions for noncompliance. The safe streets movement should recover its purpose.

Instead, some in the insurgent wing, including at city agencies, now reject automated enforcement, in part on Vision Zero grounds. That link goes to a memo by the Raleigh, NC City Traffic Engineer citing the “different approach to intersection safety” embodied in Vision Zero—namely, its emphasis on “structural changes” in lieu of “single interventions to affect behavior at individual intersections”—as context for the city’s decision to discontinue using red light camera enforcement. Though shrouded in bureaucratic word salad, this declaration represents a major departure. Enforcement—including, more recently, automated enforcement—has long been an essential building block of road safety in general and Vision Zero in particular.

What Does Street Design Essentialism Look Like?

Street design essentialism claims support, with varying degrees of depth, from fields like population health. The Vision Zero Network report reproduces a diagram representing a hierarchy of interventions, contrasting those that operate at the population level with those that require individual effort:

Vision Zero Network: Fair Warnings: Recommendations to Promote Equity in Speed Safety Camera Programs

This has some value for mapping the universe of conceivably relevant factors. But as a guide to interventions, it’s close to useless.

“Building affordable housing near transit” is the first recommended intervention. Even making very charitable assumptions, this would be completely irrelevant to the large majority of the US population and relying on it would generate many hundreds of thousands of unnecessary roadway deaths over the coming decades. Though described as having the highest impact on population health of all the interventions, it might actually have the lowest. But it’s not meant to be done by itself, is always the response to criticism of a structural factor or intervention. Ok; let’s explore the next-most structural intervention: design.

Design solutions have many weaknesses, among them the fact that they must run the NIMBY gauntlet twice: on the front end and then a second time, to withstand backlash. I detail more problems in the Atlantic article, but in a nutshell, design solutions are increasingly expensive, take forever, and fail to address the problem in many settings. But more specifically, design is not an appropriate response to the driving behaviors that account for the majority of traffic deaths.

As I wrote in that article, “street-design essentialism presumes that the most dangerous driving behaviors are unconscious” yet behaviors like not wearing a seatbelt or engaging in extreme speeding are reckless or intentional. Instead of acknowledging this limitation, design advocates tend to unhelpfully widen the aperture to causes like affordable housing that, while important, are meaningfully distinct from road safety.

Problems Not Addressed by Enforcement; Trump 2.0

Greater Greater Washington, an organization that does great urbanist work in DC, wrote a detailed report on automated camera enforcement in that city. It found considerable benefits to the city’s camera programs. However, it also described the following as limitations:

• “Cameras don’t improve the built environment”

• “Drivers can still seriously injure or kill pedestrians while driving the speed limit”

• Automated “cameras risk exacerbating racial and economic disparities”

• Automated enforcement “won’t fix the roads”

With the exception of the third bullet point, where the author takes the same view as Vision Zero Network—prioritizing the pocketbooks of people speeding through low-income areas over the safety of those who live in them—I grant that these are all correct. The question is whether farming skepticism of enforcement on these grounds is a case of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, and I think it is.

And I think that even if one is engaged in urbanism advocacy, blurring the lines is misleading. That post is from October, but I think this point holds even more strongly in the Trump 2.0 era we are now in, when urbanism goals are unlikely to receive much if any USDOT support but safety goals might receive some support.

Target Reckless Outlier Behavior, Not Unintentional Mainstream Behavior

“Beyond street design,” I ask in the Atlantic article, “what should communities focus on to improve safety?” In brief, they should go after reckless behavior deeply rather than trying to improve millions of little unconscious decisions through shallow “nudges”:

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.

Stay tuned for Part II.

1. One of the many post ideas I hope to get to is “when are cross-country comparisons useful.” For traffic safety, I think they have the potential to be very useful. However, input factors vary widely across countries and that limitation must be taken seriously.

2. Comparing outcomes in different US states can be instructive, which is something I do with co-authors in one specific context—licensing regimes governing older drivers—in this recent article.

3. Expanding the boundaries of “large” and “wealthy” could catch Poland and Korea, both of which are comparable to the US on road fatalities per VMT. Both countries are classified by the World Bank as high-income, but my subjective view is that most Americans do not consider them to be in our peer group for income or size. For reference, Poland’s 2023 GDP per capita was $22.1k and its population 36.7M. Korea, at $33.1k and 51.7M, is a closer case. France is at $44.5k and 68.2M. In 2023, US GDP per capita was $81.7k and the population 335M.

4. If you read my article side by side with the Vision Zero Network post, I think you’ll find that the latter is largely not responsive and instead attacks a caricatured case for enforcement. I may respond to it directly at some point but needless to say my argument about the importance of enforcement goes beyond any individual group downplaying its value.

5. The exception were cases where a given group had actually fought for increased traffic enforcement [edited to add: targeted at the most dangerous behaviors], which I generally support—great!.

6. Part II will explore these possibilities more deeply.

7. To be clear, the report does support the conditional use of cameras, subject to a thicket of qualifications and permitting processes that will be familiar to anyone familiar with the environmental review procedures that stymie housing development.

8. The details of automated ticket programs vary, but often the amount of the fine is set significantly lower than for an officer-issued ticket. This is a straightforward application of the expected cost of enforcement: where the likelihood of catching a violator increases via automation, the magnitude of the fine can decrease. Legal restrictions on the use of camera programs for revenue generation are common as well.