Reckless Driving Isn’t Just a Design Problem
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.
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.
[M. Nolan Gray: L.A.’s twin crises finally seem fixable]
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.
Shrugging off driver misconduct is the wrong prescription for racial and economic inequities. People in disinvested communities disproportionately become victims of reckless driving. Black pedestrians face a mortality rate more than double that of white pedestrians. More than anyone, vulnerable people need the vigorous protection of the law, not an abdication of that paramount public service.
The U.S. has the deadliest roads in the rich world. About 40,000 Americans a year now die in traffic, and a growing proportion of them are pedestrians and cyclists who don’t even benefit from our car-first paradigm. I understand why safety advocates favor solutions beyond writing tickets. As I have previously argued, driving is both cheap and a prerequisite for daily life in most of the country; vehicles are large, heavy, and underregulated; laws against their misuse are inadequate; and roads are wide, conducive to speeding, and unsafe to cross on foot. Transportation planners and legislators have gone too far in reshaping our landscapes and our laws to accommodate the automobile, with damaging consequences for racial equity and other priorities.
[Gregory H. Shill: Americans shouldn’t have to drive, but the law insists on it.]
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.
American street-safety activists used to demand better enforcement. Now, rather than focus on curbing dangerous conduct by individuals, many of them cast about for bigger villains, placing the blame for high roadway mortality on indifferent state highway departments and greedy automakers who profit from oversize SUVs. In this view, individuals are merely passive users of the transportation system, hostage to invisible forces. Coupled with activists’ obsession with street design, this approach frequently leads to a weird 21st-century form of progressive patronage: commissioning like-minded nonprofits and consultancies to produce reams of reports and unrealistic renderings; holding interminable, democratically unrepresentative listening sessions; and minting white-elephant projects that defy parody.
Street redesigns have their own pitfalls. For starters, they are far easier to plan than to execute. Changes to the built environment must run the NIMBY gantlet twice: first to get built, and then a second time to withstand the post-installation backlash. All of that became clear in the 2010s, when conditions were uniquely favorable to infrastructure building. Today, borrowing costs are several times higher, and the construction industry is short about a third of the workforce that it had before the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, input materials have skyrocketed in price. The combination has doubled roadbuilding costs in some cases. New tariffs, if implemented, would exacerbate these problems.
[M. Nolan Gray: City planning’s greatest innovation makes a comeback]
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. Just who is helped by letting reckless drivers (many of them affluent suburbanites) speed through working-class neighborhoods? Speed cameras can’t do everything—they may not deter super speeders, for example, and they’re useless against stolen cars and counterfeit plates—but where they are effective, they can remove bias from enforcement. There is no contradiction in saying that neither dangerous driving by private citizens nor abuses of police power will be tolerated. Road-safety activists should redirect some of their energy away from promoting the design-industrial complex and toward targeting the deadliest behaviors.
Design is only a tool. Just as a beautiful office renovation cannot boost morale at a failing company, many grave transportation-safety problems cannot be solved through design. Let’s start a new era of safety by ticketing unbelted motorists, talking more about super speeders (and seizing their car and license), and renewing the decades-long push against driving while intoxicated. America’s enormous traffic-death rate is a complex problem. As New Jersey has recently reminded us, enforcement must be part of the solution.